Why does nobody have the decency to protest any more?

For all its virtues, Father Ted has a lot to answer for. Heaven spare us the people who feel themselves clever for mentioning “lovely girls” during the Rose of Tralee beauty pageant or bellowing “down with this sort of thing” every time protesters object to sexy nun films. Get a new joke.

Something didn’t happen last week that suggests the latter of those gags – splendid in its original context – may, to paraphrase your mother breaking the news of a lorry-flattened pet, be set for retirement to a nice farm in the country. What if you released a (literal) sexy nun film on Good Friday and nobody turned up to protest?

Paul Verhoeven has been offending the bourgeoisie for half a century. “I caused a minor scandal in Tralee when I featured an early movie from Dutch director Paul Verhoeven, Turkish Delight, in the local film society programme,” my late colleague Michael Dwyer wrote of a 1973 film. Basic Instinct featured that notorious leg cross. His leering Showgirls still generates sighs. As recently as 2016, the Oscar-nominated Elle worried many critics with its protagonist’s arguably blase response to her own rape. But Benedetta is provocation of the old school.

Based on Judith C Brown’s Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy, the film details, with predictable explicitness, the affair between Benedetta Carlini, a 17th-century mystic, and a younger novice. There is blood, defecation, genital torture and, most provocatively, a degree of, erm, insertion. In the old days, the streets of Tralee would have been groaning with the outraged faithful.

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The decision to release commercially here on Good Friday promised provocation

In truth, nobody expects such protests any more. The Irish Film Classification Office (formerly the Irish Film Censor’s Office) moved away from banning movies at the start of the century. Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs, featuring unsimulated sex, received a certificate in 2004 and almost nobody outside the cinephile community noticed. Mainstream films have since become less sexually explicit and, as the country embraces secularism, the numbers of Christians motivated to protest special-interest art films trends inexorably towards zero.

Yet it felt as if Benedetta might offer a last opportunity to dust off the megaphone, the placard and the felt-tipped pen. The film was announced five years ago with a story on the front cover of a trade publication featuring a nipple poking from a nun’s habit. Verhoeven talked it up. The decision to release commercially here on Good Friday promised provocation.

On Benedetta’s US premiere at the New York Film Festival, the American Society for the Defence of Tradition, Family and Property staged a protest. “Walked past this group of ~20 protestors to get to my 3:00pm screening at Alice Tully Hall,” Christian Blauvelt, executive managing editor of IndieWire, tweeted. “They’re repeatedly saying Hail Marys into megaphones. Good publicity for the movie!” Further American protests followed.

The good people at RTÉ’s Liveline, always a hotbed of grass-roots fulmination, seemed to think they were onto something. An introductory chat danced tentatively around the scene in which the lovers use a whittled statuette of the Virgin Mary as a sex aid. As has long been customary in such cases, the protesting caller, a level-headed man named John O’Donovan, had not seen the film, but it is, to be fair, hard to imagine him not objecting to the finished article.

“There was a time in this country where there would be protests outside the cinema and a lot of cinemas wouldn’t show it,” Mr O’Donovan said. Nobody turned up to shout down its Irish premiere at the Virgin Media Dublin International Film Festival. A call confirms nobody protested outside the Irish Film Institute on its commercial release. An unhappy chapter in Irish history seems to have been consigned to the dust.

The "woke Nazis" so beloved of right-wing fulminators are not coming to drag cinemagoers from their seats

One suspects that not everyone connected with Benedetta will be celebrating. As Christian Blauvelt notes, such publicity would have done no harm to a film that sits at an angle to the mainstream. Yet protesting is not entirely a thing of the past.

The last time this column reported on placards outside cinemas, we were concerned with bodies such as Galway Pro-Choice objecting to the screening of an anti-abortion film called Unplanned. There were no calls for the film to be banned. But more than a few Father Ted fans pulled out the old jokes when photographs emerged of the picketers braving October winds at the Omniplex. Had they not been there, the film would almost certainly not have been mentioned in The Irish Times.

We should not get carried away. The “woke Nazis” so beloved of right-wing fulminators are not coming to drag cinemagoers from their seats. But, in this country at least, protesters from the left currently seem more easy to provoke than their Christian fundamentalist counterparts.

Next time out, Mr Verhoeven should have a crack at… Well, let us not do the work for him. He has been annoying people for longer than many of you have been alive.