It’s finally happened. According to Reuters, a killjoy conservative Spanish Catholic Archbishop, Antonio Canizares of Toledo, has expressed umbrage over a zombie procession within his archdiocese.

Canizares told off zombie marchers from the Morborio theatre company, who were re-enacting a medieval Day of the Dead performance, claiming that this was somehow ‘blasphemous’, as it purportedly involved a Virgin Mary and St. Peter amongst the participants, as well as sundry ghosts and devils. Apparently, it was deliberately intended to ‘mock’ the impending Catholic commemoration of Corpus Christi!

(Heavens, and I thought that zombies were a vulgarisation of Afro-Carribean voudoun rites involving comatose and suggestible but living subjects. Still, one lives and learns…)

Come now, Archbishop. How can zombies possibly ‘blaspheme’ anyone, when they’re (a) non-sentient; and (b) may not have an operative voicebox due to corporeal decay. Added to which, fie, what about the protection of the Undead? They may not possess arbitrary things like conscious brain activity, a heartbeat or pulse, but they have a human genetic code, some of the more recently risen look human (provided there hasn’t been too much intervening wear-and-tear) and so what if they have parasitic dependency on others to feed? Whatever happened to the sterling Christian virtues of self-sacrifice and altruism? For shame, Your Eminence!

There is a further subtext to this, though. Back in the sixteenth century, Toledo was one of the headquarters of the infamous Spanish Inquisition, so His Eminence’s predecessors might have ironically been quite familiar with mangled, eviscerated, incinerated and otherwise tortured still-living or newly dead bodies.

What next? Will His Eminence get cross at little green or grey aliens? Or will he demand the Vatican launches a crusade against pallid Transylvanian emigrants named Vlad, with sharp canine and incisor teeth? He may to designate this organisation ‘Christians Against Imaginary Creatures’ (CRAIC)- which is Gaelic for joke, or jolly jape.

Recommended:

“Zombie Parade called ‘blasphemous’ TVNZ (27.05.08): http://tvnz.co.nz/view/page/411366/1799158