RICHMOND, Virginia (LifeSiteNews) — The newspaper for the Diocese of Richmond issued an apology following the publication of a satirical cartoon mocking an unvaccinated patient sick with COVID-19, admitting it “lacked the love of Christ that we, as Catholics, are taught to preach and to live.”
The cartoon, which can be found on page 6 of the September 6 issue of The Catholic Virginian, is made up of four panels.
The first one depicts a woman sitting on a chair, wearing a mask, and asking Apple’s Siri assistant for the proper word for “you get what you deserve,” to which Siri replies that the word in Sanskrit is called “Karma.”
In the second panel the woman asks for the word for “enjoying” someone’s bad karma and learns that it is called “Schadenfreude” in German.
In panel three the woman learns that the appropriate expression in English for this is “I told you so.”
And in the last panel, she is shown turning toward a man lying on a hospital bed, possibly her husband. The man is breathing through a ventilator and wearing a yellow T-shirt with the words “anti-mask, anti-vax” written on it. The woman tells the man, “I told you so.”
The Catholic Virginian’s editor-in-chief, Brian T. Olszewski, published an apology Monday, saying the cartoon “lacked the love of Christ that we, as Catholics, are taught to preach and to live — especially to the sick and dying.”
“I made a grievous error in editorial judgment,” he continued, “a decision that disrupted the paper’s mission to instruct, inform and inspire readers — and I apologize for it.”
“Had I taken additional time to reflect and more carefully consider what it was depicting,” added Olszewski, “it would not have appeared in The Catholic Virginian,”
The apology came after readers expressed “outrage, indignation and disappointment” following the publication of the cartoon.
The “you get what you deserve” rhetoric used by the cartoonist has become common among those trying to push for universal vaccination and vaccine mandates. Some have even suggested that unvaccinated people who become ill with COVID-19 should not receive free medical treatment.