Catholics Insulted by Mexican Playboy Cover

This piece on CNN yesterday highlights a controversy in Mexico over a Playboy Magazine cover depicting a scantily dressed woman wearing a veil, posing in front of a stained glass window, with the words in Spanish "Te adoremus, Maria." The model on the cover is María Florencia Onori, and the magazine's publisher asserts that the piece, released on the the Virgin of Guadalupe's feast day, is not supposed to depict Mary, the mother of Jesus.

The CNN story is an interview with Miami priest and radio host Father Albert Cutie, and, accoding to Cutie, Catholics aren't buying it. The cover is both offensive and blasphemous, Cutie says.

The story does a nice job of explicating the role of culture in the understanding of religion, explaining to non-Latino viewers the meanings that images and the words would have.