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In April, 1977, the Italian television channel RAI 2 aired the late Dario Fo and Franca Rame’s Mistero Buffo, a collection of stories from the Bible and church history enacted in the single-performer, giullare style that Fo famously developed. On RAI 1, at the same time, was showing Franco Zeffirelli’s Jesus, a series on the life of Christ, designed by the famous director in his own words to “create a mood of pacification, of love” in his television audience1. The Vatican did not only make its preference clear, but declared, in their official newspaper, Fo’s irreverent treatment of sacred stories to be “the most blasphemous program ever broadcast in the history of world television2.” Predictably, Fo embraced the critique by declaring “This is the best compliment the Vatican could have paid me3.” The Vatican Secretary of State actually called for priests to devote their upcoming sermons to condemning Mistero Buffo – it is not clear how many complied – and dozens of Catholic institutions attempted to try Fo in court for blasphemy. The Vatican was unable to stop the showing that spring, but did manage to keep Fo off the air for seven years: a rebroadcast of Mistero Buffo scheduled for 1982 was canceled. During a 1984 tour of Mistero Buffo to Argentina, the Church stridently attacked it and production incurred both peaceful and violent protests4. What were the issues in what has been called by Ron Jenkins “a scandal of epic proportions5” and to what degree might Fo be “gu
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