Catholics Up In Arms Over Sony

Sony has upset hardline Catholics with an advertisment for Playstation that showed a bloke wearing a crown of thorns and had the motto ‘ten years of passion’ as a reference to the Playstation’s tenth birthday.

 In the advert, a young man smiles cheekily, and the thorns are morphed into the PlayStation’s logo.  Now the company has repented after being attacked by Catholics for running the advertisement for Playstation that had a light hearted reference to Jesus Christ. Anyone who followed the saga Monty Python’s Life of Brian will know that some Christians don’t appreciate such references, so Sony should have known better.

Sony spinsters in Italy expressed regret over the reaction to the advert. It confessed the “spirit of the message was misunderstood”, however it has pulled the advert. We assumed that senior representatives have donned sackcloth and ashes and are beating themselves rigorously as we speak.

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Antonio Sciortino, editor of Famiglia Cristiana, a mass-circulation Catholic weekly pointed out that if Christians acted like Moslems then there would have been a ‘strong reaction’ against the ads. There is nothing like an Islamic stereotype to enforce your case. Jesus is an important part of Islam too and there does not have been any fatwas against Playstations issued.

“This time they’ve gone too far,” said Antonio Sciortino, editor of Famiglia Cristiana (Christian Family), a mass-circulation Catholic weekly.”If this had concerned Islam there would have been a really strong reaction,” Sciortino was quoted as saying in the Corriere della Sera newspaper. In the Bible, Jesus was forced to wear a crown of thorns by mocking Roman guards before he was crucified. In the advert, a young man smiles cheekily, wearing a crown whose thorns are twisted into the geometric shapes that are PlayStation’s logo.

In a statement, Sony Computer Entertainment Italia expressed regret over the reaction to the advert. It acknowledged that the “spirit of the message was misunderstood” and said the campaign would not continue.

Sony’s ad is not the first to irk Catholics in recent months. “There’s no religion any more,” read a slogan for IKEA in an advert to inform Italians, whose Church attendance is steadily falling, that its furniture stores were open on a Sunday. And two adapted versions of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Last Supper have been used for adverts that caused controversy in other predominantly Catholic countries. French fashion designer Francois Girbaud featured Jesus as a woman with a table of glamorous disciples, while Irish bookmaker Paddy Power depicted the original Christians gambling, the traitor Judas clutching his 30 pieces of silver.