A recounting of an episode of Showtime's cable show, B***s***. Link. Excerpt:
While the episode titled “Holier Than Thou,” ends with a few smacks at Mahatma Gandhi and the Dalai Lama, Penn Jillette mostly savaged the world's most beloved woman of the 20th century by Catholics and non-Catholics alike. The woman beatified by Pope John Paul II and surely to be declared a saint was known as Mother Teresa. On this Viacom/Showtime program she is called “Mother F–ing Teresa.”
The show features notoriously vicious anti-Catholics like Christopher Hitchens and Aroup Chatterjee. Viewers are told that she intentionally let the poor suffer, providing neither beds nor bathroom facilities. “She had the f–king coin and pissed it away on nunneries,” says Penn Jillette.
[The Catholic League's William Donohue] said it did not bother him they called him “Catholic Boy” on the show, and not even when they referred to him with the F word since he could “only see good in her.” But when they mocked the Catholic Church's teaching on the meaning of suffering; when the nuns who worked with Mother Teresa in the Missionaries of Charity were referred to with the F-word and the offensive C-word for female genitalia; and when they said of the poor that “They had to suffer so that Mother [F-word] Teresa could be enlightened,” he protested. “They are behaved like monsters... It turned into hate speech.”
This anti-Catholicism is no accident. The Showtime web site actually boasts about the aching anti-religious bigotry behind the show. “By their own admission, Penn & Teller have been dying to do a show like this. Confirmed skeptics and pro-science atheists (they call God an 'imaginary friend'), these magicians are big fans of the art of debunking.” The Showtime booster copy continues: “As our increasingly anti-intellectual, anti-science culture moves on each day to new crackpot subject matters, Penn & Teller are there to aggressively shoot down whack-jobs and fuzzy thinkers, no matter where they originate.”
