Routine Religion Blunders on TV

[studiesinlight]

Two shows that I am not regularly watching happened, this week, to fall in my orbit while exhibiting the same sort of small, silly, needless cultural blunder. 

• On Private Practice (which followed Pushing Daisies, which I am watching), a divorced Catholic couple getting back together did not know, until told by a priest, that they are still married in the eyes of the Church.  Um.  Duh.  And these characters were doctors, so they are unlikely to be complete morons, and actively involved in their parish, so unlikely to be complete, um, well see the last bullet point for a word I'm not using here.  How could they not know that?
  
  
• On Bones (which my VCR has not yet been told to stop recording), Booth called a bishop "your holiness," which is sort of like calling a duke "your majesty," which could have been sheer nervousness, but really should never have happened to this character.  And then "monsignor" got mixed into this etiquette mess, too, all about the one bishop, which was perhaps supposed to be funny, but didn't resolve with the right answer as a punchline.  ("Your excellency" would have been correct in the US, I believe, not that it matters at all, at all, but Booth should have known better than me, not worse.)
  
  
• Further on Bones, Booth (for the second time) demonstrated a knowledge of elementary Latin and related it to having been an altar boy (a different time he claimed no knowledge of elementary Latin and said this was because he went to public school), but Booth was obviously born after Vatican II (the actor was born 1969; the Council ended 1965), so chalking Latin knowledge up to being an altar boy is either a misdirection, a joke, or an implication that Booth's family belongs to an extreme fringe group, like Mel Gibson, and in any of those cases the remark should have gotten a rise from the person to whom he made the remark.
  
  
• Further yet on Bones, the psychologist character asserted that a "heathen" is an usurper, one angling to supplant the legitimate monarch.  Dictionary, people!

Of course TV gets everything wrong, not just these things.  I remember when CSI made out that Alaska is not a state!  And 1066 came before 1228.  :-)  Even so . . .