The 'Late Night with Seth Meyers' host is called out by the Catholic League for cracking jokes on his late-night show about a bizarre attack at a Brooklyn church.
- January 17, 2020
AceShowbiz - Seth Meyers has incurred the wrath of the leading officials at the Catholic League after joking about a bizarre attack at a Brooklyn church.
Meyers made his quip about the crime at the New York place of worship on his show on Tuesday, January 14, 2020, which compared it to the scandal of unreported child abuse that has dogged the Catholic Church over the past two decades.
"A Brooklyn man was arrested at a Catholic church on Sunday for allegedly pouring juice on the altar and splashing it at the priest," Meyers said. "Wow, that's crazy, a crime in a Catholic church that led to an arrest. We will tolerate a lot of stuff here, but you can't splash the juice. That's where we draw the line."
The joke enraged Catholic League president Bill Donohue, who compared the 12 January attack to recent antisemitic ones in the area, saying "no one" made light of these.
"The Nazis used to bust into houses of worship in Germany, and now we have people like Seth Meyers thinking it is cute when neo-Nazis bust into Catholic churches in America," he raged. "No, Catholics are not fearing pogroms, but it is alarming nonetheless to think that public personalities think it is cute to disrupt a religious service and vandalise a church. The man is sick."
Reports haven't linked the incident to any neo-Nazi groups, and Father Jossy Vattothu, who was on the wrong end of the juicing, told the New York Post he was baffled by his attacker's motivations but that he would pray for him.
Donohue went on to say that Meyers had "crossed the line" and vowed to denounce the "Late Night with Seth Meyers" host to "top executives" at NBC. Representatives of NBC did not respond to a request for comment.
