Why do Onions Smell Bad?

It's not that I don't get satire. I spend a lot of time doing literary analysis of the stuff.
Nevertheless, a recent Onion piece left me scratching my head regarding its closing remarks:

The deities were all unanimous in agreeing that the sole Catholic fatality should be condemned to forever roam the Earth as an anguished, wretched ghost, as Catholicism is the only truly false religion and has no god to accept its faithful when they die.

The mock-article is about how a bus accident that killed people of various ethnic and religious backgrounds in New York. The gods of different faiths were then forced to sift through the remains and take their own believers to their respective afterlives. For whatever reason, the author decided to take the jab above at Catholics.

Isabel and I have been debating how to read it. On one hand, it could just be anti-Catholicism. That seems too easy of a solution, since this is a satirical newspaper. Of course, the fact that it's a satirical newspaper lets it make open and blatant hate speech and then just excuse itself by saying that it's satire, so it must not mean what it says.

Maybe it's a commentary on anti-Catholicism itself. The fact that it can blatantly attack one religion and no other, and the fact that it probably won't see its offices bombed or any innocent civilians killed in the streets in retaliation, shows the state of affairs regarding the public's view of Catholicism and the Catholic's patient response. The article pretty much ends by saying everyone hates Catholics.

Giving the author the benefit of the doubt, maybe it is meant to addresses the recent document asserting the supremacy of the Church. In this case, we still have a crux. Is it sticking it to Catholics for having the audacity to claim it is the one true Church? Or is it sticking it to all the other religions by showing how absurd pluralism is in actual practice?

Comments

[Lindsay]

So what we really want to bring about is anti-anti-Catholicism. Makes my head spin a little bit.

[PeterTerp]

I'm not sure that anti-anti-Catholicism is the answer. I always get nervous whenever I see someone getting angry about these things. It doesn't seem like the right response. What we really need is someone to get up on a podium, deliver a plaintive sigh, wag their head, and then sit back down again.

[Lindsay]

Oh. I've been doing that for ages now. Good to know I'm not off the ball, as it were.