I just love it when nannies get their knickers into knots about something publicly sexy. In the case of the scandalous Antonio Federici Gelato ads that have whipped up such a scrum across the pond in England, the panjandrums of public morals, a.k.a. the Thought Police, are perhaps missing the mark a bit when it comes to aiming their high and holy dudgeon.
This is the ad that riled them up so much. A pregnant nun, enjoying a pint of Federici gelato. Well, obviously nuns shouldn’t be getting themselves pregnant; they’re supposed to be the brides of J.C. and therefore above your basic everyday fleshly penetration. So the nannies are having a cow.
But did everybody fail to notice the obvious? The tagline is clever, to be sure: Immaculately Conceived, it says, a droll double-entendre implying the pristine purity of the gelato (and it’s supposed to be seriously spiffy stuff) that also brings up the issue of conception and pregnant nuns. But that’s the problem. The advertising writers would seem to share a nearly-universal misunderstanding about the Immaculate Conception, implying that the doctrine refers somehow to the idea of virgin birth.
But that isn’t correct. The Doctrine of Immaculate Conception (DIC) has nothing to do with Mary’s being a virgin at the time of her ghostly penetration. The doctrine states that Mary was free from "original sin"—i.e., the transgression of Adam & Eve—at the moment of her own conception.
It’s actually a pretty silly doctrine, but then again it’s a silly religion. The DIC was devised during the 19th century as a band-aid to cover a festering sore of controversy amongst clergy, who would seem to have had nothing better to do with their time except sit around and argue the fine points of nonsense. (Well, they were also pretty busy diddling the altar boys and acolytes, but you can’t do that all day and night.) They got themselves into a snit about the difficulty of J.C.’s being appropriately pristine if his mother was a plain old sinner just like the rest of us. Since Dad was presumably the big guy upstairs, he presented no particular problem. But mom: well, there was a nasty pickle for you, a thorn in the side of ecclesiastical sophisticates everywhere.
So they finessed it and made up a solution to a made-up problem. They declared that she was without original sin: presto, they said, problem solved.
I can’t tell you how much I would just love to be able to do that with some of my problems. Ungainly credit card bill eating into my monthly income? I declare the Doctrine of the Immaculate Charge—i.e., that charge was divinely-inspired and therefore does not appear on my statement. Irritating neighbor making too much noise all the time? I declare the Doctrine of the Immaculate Neighbor—i.e., that there has never been a house on the lot next door and therefore no neighbor.
But I’m queering the pitch a bit given that those are real problems that might actually plague real people. The DIC was promulgated to solve an imaginary problem. So I could come up with, say, the Doctrine of the Immaculate Di-lithium Crystals, claiming that Star Trek episodes may no longer turn to that oh-so convenient plot twist of having the Di-lithium Crystals go pfffffft because Di-lithium Crystals are by nature Immaculate, i.e., free from original decay.
So let’s be clear here on the subject of blasphemy, another one of those imaginary, trumped-up offences so near and dear to the clerical heart. The days are long gone when the clerics could actually do anything much about it. All they can do now is moan and gripe and call the nannies to ask for a helping hand. Personally I’m all for blasphemy; my friend Edgar and I used to slay ’em at summer camp with our rousing renditions of "Get it Up For Jesus".
But, dammit, get it right. Don’t blaspheme inaccurately. Take the time to research your target before taking aim and firing.
And then fire at will, as the good folks at Antonio Federici have continued to do. My hands-down favorite carries the tagline We Believe in Salivation with a delectable accompanying image. And to the Federici folks’ credit, they resisted the temptation to make one of the characters underage.
