Jesus Christ Superstar: The Difficult Impact in Italy

Everyone knows that Jesus Christ Superstar was a major musical and cinematic phenomenon worldwide, but perhaps not everyone knows about its difficult impact in Italy and why.

The 1973 film directed by Norman Jewison was, in fact, subjected to prior review by L’Osservatore Romano before distribution, because this famous musical—I would dare say the most famous rock opera of all time, depicting the last seven days of Christ’s life—also troubled the Church, given the absolutely blasphemous perception that Italian public opinion had of it at the time.

The film had the audacity to juxtapose the Gospels with hippie culture, to present a Jesus who performs no miracles, to portray the last week of Jesus’s life without the Madonna, and reached its maximum and most blatant desecration in the reversal of roles between Judas (represented as the film’s primary character) and Jesus… only secondary…!

…Are these the “only” innovations, then? Not at all.
Last but not least, the approach—also certainly unconventional for the time—in which Mary Magdalene is portrayed as clearly in love with Jesus (recall the song “I Don’t Know How to Love Him”) and the depiction of the crowd inciting the crucifixion… perceived at the time as a clear symptom of anti-Semitism.

In short, that musical whose authors were so agnostic as to consider only Judas wise, that same work which was the pinnacle from a musical standpoint, expressing itself maximally in the fantastic and intoxicating “Superstar” and through the rousing “The Last Supper,” did not have an easy cinematic debut, appearing as a film too pretentious in its costumes and too hippie in its culture.
How could such a text not be perceived as blasphemous in the deeply bourgeois Italy of 1973?