At last the Vatican was taking seriously the scale of what was going on, which John Paul, with his own austere sexual integrity, seemed incapable of imaginatively appreciating. It was too late to prevent the decimation of congregations throughout the anglophone world and in Europe: an unprecedented blow to the authority of the Church in which ridicule, exemplified in the deceptively farcical Irish-made television sitcom Father Ted, was mixed with real fury. Whether the effects will spread into the rest of the Catholic world remains to be seen.73
