Pop singer Sabrina Carpenter jokingly rejected the backlash to a violent, lewd music video she filmed in a Brooklyn Catholic Church that led the bishop to reconsecrate the sanctuary. The pop star told Variety when asked about the controversial shoot inside Our Lady of Mt. Carmel-Annunciation Parish in Williamsburg, “We got approval in advance. And Jesus was a carpenter.”
The video for her song “Feather” brought outrage for depicting a scantily clad Carpenter surrounded by coffins and dancing in front of the altar, which was adorned with a bottle of liquid marked “RIP,” a doll that says “Good Girls Go 2 Heaven,” and a book titled “Tampons Should Be Free.” One of the coffins was decorated with “RIP B—” beneath a cross. The video, which also features horrific scenes reminiscent of slasher horror films, has amassed 12 million views on YouTube since its Halloween debut.
Brooklyn Bishop Robert Brennan said he was “appalled” by the video, and Monsignor Jamie J. Gigantiello was stripped of his administrative duties after an investigation by the diocese, though he still performs Mass at the church. While the parish reportedly claimed the production company behind the video wasn’t forthcoming about the provocative nature of the video, the diocese determined that “a review of the documents presented to the parish in advance of the production, while failing to depict the entirety of the scenes, clearly portray inappropriate behavior unsuitable for a church sanctuary.”
In response to Carpenter’s desecration, Brennan and other leaders in the diocese performed a Mass of reparation, which involved blessing the sanctuary with holy water, stripping the altar, and reconsecrating it. Gigantiello was apologetic after the fallout, asking parishioners in a letter to forgive him. He claimed he thought the shoot was going to be taking place outside and that he and church leadership were “not aware that anything provocative was occurring in the church, nor were we aware that faux coffins and other funeral items would be placed in the sanctuary.”
The monsignor noted that “in an effort to further strengthen the bonds between the young creative artists who make up this community and the parish,” he agreed to the filming after a “general search of the artists involved did not involve anything questionable.”
“While I take full responsibility for the erroneous decision to allow the filming, I want to assure you that I had no knowledge that such a scene would be filmed in our church, which we worked so hard to restore to its present sacred beauty,” he wrote, adding that the Blessed Sacrament had been removed from the church prior to filming.
Gigantiello also noted that the $5,000 the church received for the video was donated to Bridge to Life, a nonprofit pregnancy center that has a relationship with the Brooklyn Diocese.