Commercial Showing Nuns Eating Potato Chips for Communion Sparks Outrage: ‘Blasphemy’

Anna Lazarus Caplan
·2 min read

The ad for Amica Chips shows a nun enjoying the crunchy snack during Mass

  • A Catholic watchdog group is calling for a commercial in Italy to be banned

  • The ad for Amica Chips depicts nuns eating potato chips instead of communion wafers

  • The creator of the ad said they used "strong British irony” to “express the irresistible crunchiness of Amica Chips”

A Catholic group in Italy has labeled a potato chip commercial as “blasphemy” and is calling for the spot — which features nuns enjoying the chips instead of communal wafers — to be banned.

The Italian Association of Radio and Television Listeners (AIART) said the commercial for Amica Chips “offends the religious sensitivity of millions of practicing Catholics by trivializing the comparison between the potato chip and the consecrated object,” according to CNN and the Catholic News Agency (CNA).

In the 30-second ad, set to “Ave Maria,” the head of nunnery seemingly substitutes chips for the traditional wafers before Mass — much to the surprise of the other nuns and the priest.

The commercial ends as the music reaches a crescendo, but the song is barely heard over the head nun’s crunching of the chips.

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“The commercial shows a lack of respect and creativity,” Giovanni Baggio, the association’s president, said in a statement obtained by The Guardian. “It is a sign of an inability to do marketing without resorting to symbols that have nothing to do with consumption and crunchy food.”

According to CNN, the Catholic newspaper Avvenire also took issue with the ad.

“Christ has been reduced to a potato chip,” the newspaper wrote in an editorial, “debased and vilified like 2,000 years ago.”

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But the company that created the commercial has a different take on the controversy.

In a statement to The Guardian, Lorenzo Marini Group said that the ad’s concept features “strong British irony” and is intended to “express the irresistible crunchiness of Amica Chips” in a deliberately exaggerated and provocative way.

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Late Tuesday, the Institute of Advertising Self-Discipline, the country’s private advertising standards authority, “upheld our appeal for the immediate suspension of the commercial,” AIART said on its website, per CNA.

A committee cited a rule that the commercials “must not offend moral, civil, and religious convictions.”

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