For the last quarter-century or so Madonna has made a fortune from generating controversy by tweaking the Catholic Church. This time though, it might very well earn her a trip to the pokey.

A German law prohibits insulting religious beliefs, and it’s hard to see how her “Look at Me, I’m Jesus” stage stunt does anything but that. Would she pretend she was Mohammed?

Her anti-Catholic stunts are tired and get more and more contrived every year. It’s perhaps a measure of how out of gas she is creatively that she has to keep returning to the same old stuff to get attention. It seems these days that her creativity is limited to finding new ways to tweak Catholics. I can almost see her sitting down after cutting an album and trying to decide how to work a brand new anti-Catholic stunt into her promotion. It’s too much of a pattern to be coincidence, and her claims that it’s not anti-Catholic are plainly ridiculous on their face.

The plain truth is that if she was putting out great music she wouldn’t have to rely on generating controversy to get people to buy it. To me, her insistence on this sort of anti-religious stagecraft is an implicit admission that her music needs a gimmick because it won’t sell without it.

We’ll see if she has the courage of her convictions and is prepared to put on her mock crucifixion when she actually has something to lose. It will also be a test to see if the German authorities actually have the backbone to enforce a law which is supposed to apply to everyone to someone of Madonna’s celebrity…

Popularity: 4%