"Despite the many, many, many times that “The Simpsons,” above, has mocked or satirized religion, that long-running animated series has earned an endorsement from the official Vatican newspaper on the occasion of the show’s 20th anniversary, The Associated Press reported. In an article published on Tuesday in L’Osservatore Romano under the headline “Aristotle’s Virtues and Homer’s Doughnut,” “The Simpsons” was praised for its “realistic and intelligent writing” (and rapped on the knuckles for “excessively crude language, the violence of certain episodes or some extreme choices by the scriptwriters”). Noting plots in which Homer Simpson has variously renounced his faith and mispronounced the name of Jesus, L’Osservatore Romano wrote that Homer nonetheless “finds in God his last refuge” and that the character’s attitudes toward religion were “a mirror of the indifference and the need that modern man feels toward faith."...source
