Red Hot Catholic Love
Template:Infobox South Park episode "Red Hot Catholic Love" is episode 608 of the Comedy Central series South Park. It originally aired on July 3, 2002.
Plot synopsis
The episode begins with several of the characters at the South Park Catholic church. Priest Maxi informs them that the Young Men's Catholic Retreat is coming up, which will be a boat ride. Stan thinks it would be fun, but his father Randy has disturbing visions of the Retreat as "The Catholic Boat", showing happy, smiling priests and traumatized looking children (Butters, Tweek, and Stan).
After church, Randy and the other parents discuss the Retreat and agree that they don't want their kids to go. They also decide to have a counselor talk to the boys, to find out if Priest Maxi had been molesting them. The counselor asks them several questions, culminating in "Did Father Maxi, at any time, ever try to put something in your butt?" The boys have no idea what she is talking about, and later when they meet up with Kyle they all wonder what she could have meant. They ask Chef what she meant, but he (understandably) leaves immediately.
Cartman has a "brilliant" idea. He wonders if perhaps the counselor was talking about food. Cartman reasons that ingesting food through the mouth causes one to defecate through the butt, so eating through the butt must cause defecation through the mouth. The other boys (especially Kyle) think it is stupid and disgusting. Cartman bets him $20 it will work.
Meanwhile, all the parents decide to become atheists.
Father Maxi has gathered a meeting of Catholic priests to discuss the problem of child molestation. He wants to stop it from happening altogether, while the other priests want to continue molesting the boys, but stop the boys from telling. Maxi decides he has to go to the Vatican.
Cartman stands over a toilet, trying to defecate out of his mouth. All the boys (except for Craig) all watch in amazement as he succeeds. Kyle hands over the $20.
Priest Maxi is excited to be at Vatican City, but once inside the Vatican, Maxi finds things are the same: Catholic Priests from all over the world are molesting children. They claim the "Holy Document of Vatican Law" does not prohibit the behavior, so Maxi wants to change the law. The other priests (including an alien from the planet Gelgamek) find this outrageous.
Cartman is continually rubbing in Kyle's nose in the fact that he won $20 from him. At home, Stan tells his parents that Cartman shoved food up his butt and crapped out of his mouth. After being skeptical initially, Randy also decides to try it and is amazed when it works.
The Catholics argue that if they cannot molest boys, they cannot get sex as the Holy Document of Vatican Law prohibits priests from marrying. Maxi suggests they also change that part, then the Cardinal tells him that it cannot be changed as no one knows where it is. Maxi decides to try and find it. Cartman continues to annoy Kyle about the $20 Kyle had to give him. Kyle sarcastically replies "So you crapped out of your mouth, do you want a freaking medal?!" Then the news comes on and says that Cartman's method of eating is much healthier, and Cartman is to receive a "freaking medal." A cooking show is on, and Martha Stewart is preparing a turkey to eat. She places liberal amounts of lubricant and wraps it to narrow it up. As she is hiking the turkey up her skirt, the FBI shows up. The FBI allows her to shove the turkey up her anus before they take her away.
Maxi is searching through the lower levels of the Vatican, and goes through a gauntlet (which looks like a video game, complete with videogame noises and trappings) in order to reach the Holy Document. He gets to it and takes it back. The parents are having a dinner together, talking about atheism and shoving food up their butts and defecating out of their mouths.
Now that Maxi has retrieved the Holy Document, he wishes to change it. But the Pope says they must first consult highest power. He summons the "Queen Spider." The Spider declares that the Holy Document of Vatican Law cannot be changed. Maxi thinks the whole thing is ridiculous, and tears the Document in two. The building begins to crumble.
Cartman has been to the bank again and had the $20 converted into quarters so that he can swim in a pool of Kyle's money. As he does this, Kyle says he accepts that Cartman beat him, which apparently spoils Cartman's sense of victory and he ceases to bother Kyle about it. Then their parents come outside and tell them the Vatican is destroyed.
Maxi stands in front of the ruins, and tells everyone that Catholicism is not about the Holy Document of Vatican Law, molestation, or Queen Spiders, but about being a good person and God. He says by clouding the moral lessons of the Bible with needless ceremony, the Vatican has caused people to reject religion and argues that "when they have no mythology to live their lives by, they just start spewing a bunch of crap out of their mouths." As he's saying this on live television, Tweek's dad is shown about to defecate out of his mouth into a bucket.
The parents all realize they have made a huge mistake and decide to stop shoving food up their butts and start going to church again.
The Catholic Boat lyrics
The Catholic Boat's gonna be headin' on out today.
The Catholic Boat. Time to throw all your cares away.
Get some hot Christian action; it'll make you...
Trivia
- "The Catholic Boat" is a parody of The Love Boat.
- The great queen spider worshiped as God is a reference to the 1970s Doctor Who serial "Planet of the Spiders."
- The old monk in the St. Peter's catacombs, and especially the line "What do you seek, Father?" is a reference to the Monty Python movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
- The scene where Priest Maxi tries to get the Holy Document of Vatican Law is a reference to the 1982 game Pitfall!
- When Priest Maxi says that maybe the law about chastity in the Holy Document of Vatican Law should be changed to permit sex with a woman, it might be a refrence to Fr. Maxi's sexual past. He was caught having sex with a woman in a church confessional in the episode, Do the Handicapped Go to Hell?.
- Priest Maxi says at the end of the show that he loves being Catholic but argues for the primacy of the Bible and against needless ceremony -- an unusual position for a Catholic priest to take, considering the Church's emphasis on both Scripture and Tradition.
- In syndication, the scenes where characters defecate through their mouths has been replaced with an intertitle stating that the scene has been "edited out for your protection."
- As the parents are defecating from their mouths, they are ranting about the religious right. Although Stone and Parker both have more libertarian-leaning views and have disdain for socially religious conservatives, this gag proves that they are just as irritated by arguments from the more socially liberal/secular types. Stone and Parker explain this in the commentary for this episode.
- This is the episode that reveals that almost all of the principle and recurring characters in South Park are Roman Catholic. It also deals with, as well as makes fun of, the Roman Catholic sex abuse cases.
- When Priest Maxi is in the first meeting with the local priests, when the local priests say where they are from, "Fort Rollins" and "Greenley", these are obvious references to the Colorado towns Fort Collins and Greeley.
- In the scene where Father Maxi goes to the Vatican, the French priest and the British priest are the same character except that the French priest has brown hair and the British priest has grey hair.