I had the pleasure of receiving a reply to the e-mail I sent to the NCRV about their program Man Bijt Hond, which proudly featured the desecration of the Blessed Sacrament. It’s a standard reply, probably sent to all who complained, and as such it’s necessarily general.
Dear,
Thank you for your mail.
It has never been our intention to hurt people with this, sorry for this.
We hope you will continue to enjoy our program.
Regards,
Editor
NCRV
Man Bijt Hond
Beautiful Blues, having received the same reply, shares his thoughts about the apology and concludes that there are three explanations: 1) the NCRV thinks it’s all just a big joke and decides to send a ridiculous email to the complainers. 2) They mean what they say and have no clue about the Catholic faith. 3) They don’t care, but decide to reply out of politeness. Personally, I tend to to think that option 2 and 3 are most likely. The reply barely ticks all the boxes to be considered polite, and that makes me think of something that was whipped up to satisfy the complainers and nothing more.
And it’s sad to see they did not offer a public apology, because I would hope that the desecration hurt a lot more people than sent in complaints.
Still, let’s accept the apology for what it is and hope this won’t happen again.
In Caelo et in Terra 
You corrected the ridiculous spelling mistakes in your translation. I’ll try to include equivalents for the English readers, so they can sense the completely uninterested way the reply sounds:
I’ll never watch that @$(@* program again.
Yes, I did correct it a bit. I don’t like spelling mistakes, not even when other make them 😉
New offence! From Dutch paper Spits! this time.
The satirical comic ‘AAaRGh’ shows a guy dressed in green with a ‘monsigneur’ har an a CHI-RHO sign on his chest and says”
“Jezus nam een baksteen en zei: Laat ons een Kerk bouwen. Zodat we een excuus hebben om koorknaapjes te ontvangen.”
Ugh, disgusting. Dutch society in general is unable to overcome the initial emotional respsonse to injustices. I’m not saying an emotional response is not justified, but in order to resolve a situation we need to be able to overcome that and reply objectively and civilised. For many people and organisations that seems a leap too far.
“Jezus nam een baksteen en zei: Laat ons een Kerk bouwen. Zodat we een excuus hebben om koorknaapjes te ontvangen.”
(“Jesus took a brick and said: Let’s make a Church, so we’ll have an excuse to receive choir boys”)
Our society can only think about sex and projects that even on the Son of God … it says more about the Dutch society than about Him. A television program desecrating the Host and giving such a lame excuse for it, is much worse.
@ Kattekliek
Yes thank you, that was the exact quote. Really sad!
Of course they can make such jokes… because we are not going to try to kill them.
I wonder if they dared do the same lame kind of jokes with Mohammed or Vishnu or Buddha.
Well, Buddha would be a relatively safe target 😛
By the way, Mark, we’re writing an open letter to the NCRV to complain about this TV-program and their lousy excuse. If you would like to read the draft and decide if you want to be in, please email me. Do it before tomorrow noon, please.
Last week I left a comment at the website of Man bijt hond too. I think this an insensitive apology, but at least they tried. I laughed at: We hope you will continue to enjoy our program… Come on, that’s just a stupid sentence.
And Spits (part of Telegraaf Media Groep) should not be called a newspaper. Too bad people read it anyway.
Time for some good news. NRC Next published a couple of letters from readers who were very critical about the way NRC Next wrote about the demonstration in Den Bosch. Usually they publish one or two letters a day, so I think a lot of people e-mailed them about this subject.