Whose side are you on: Vatican or Benetton?

It is the question every parent has to confront at some point in their lives. At what point do you tell your toddler to stop saying ‘poo!’ in public. At first it is mildly amusing. It rapidly becomes tiresome. Eventually, it is simply irritating.

As with puerile children, so with Benetton: the brand has a history of provocative (i.e. offensive) campaigns, using AIDS victims, death row prisoners and the like to sell jumpers.

Their latest offering of global figures snogging one another seems to have done the trick. One, showing Pope Benedict kissing Egypt’s Ahmed el Tayyeb, Imam of the al-Azhar mosque in Cairo, fully and passionately on the mouth has so incensed the Vatican that, having managed to have the offending commercial removed, it is now taking “proper legal measures" to stop its use elsewhere. We are, it appears, at the irritating stage, when the parent feels entitled to offer a short, sharp corrective smack.

This, alas, is a mistake. Benetton may behave like an errant toddler, attempting to shock its way to public attention, but raising the legal hand is unlikely to get them to behave; quite the opposite, in fact.

To be fair, the Vatican’s legal measures do not appear to be directed against Benetton per se, but rather “to prevent the circulation, via the mass media and in other ways” of the offensive image. “It is a serious lack of respect for the Pope,” the Vatican statement explained, “[and] an affront to the feelings of the faithful.”

Quite so, but Benetton not only knew it would “affront” and “provoke” - they were counting on it. The company’s excuse – the advert was intended “solely to battle the culture of hate in all its forms” – was self-evidently facile. The campaign was intended, like so many others, to shock or offend its way into public notice. Many more people have heard about it now than they would have had the campaign been milder or more decent. Job done.

If Benetton were in any way sincere about working against hatred, it would not begin by so diligently seeking its close cousin, offence. That said, while legal action against the use of the image may work in the short run, it will do little to encourage Benetton to grow up.

On the contrary, it will merely confirm to advertisers that, providing they just nibble at the boundaries of respect and do not flout them blatantly (see perhaps Ricky Gervais’ recent news appearance), they will get more attention than their money could otherwise have hoped to buy.

There are times when legal smacking is appropriate, even necessary - demonstrable lies, provocations to hate (as opposed to mock), and so forth. This is not one of them. The Vatican is entirely right to encourage a culture of respect, part of which would entail respecting the image of the Pope. But its efforts to protect the image of the Pope will only provoke further infantile outbursts from advertisers who find it easier to be offensive than creative.