The singer Madonna has now pushed things way too far and needs for her own good to be formally excommunicated.

This is not a judgment but an observation. God will judge her inner goodness or evil, as He and He alone will judge all of us. There is no way of knowing the full of extent of difficulties she had growing up.

But we can judge her acts and her acts -- literally -- are blasphemous and actually more than that. As one Vatican bishop said, they are satanic.

The latest outrage was Sunday -- in Rome, no less -- where the Michigan native and cradle Catholic donned a skimpy outfit during a typically suggestive, salacious show, placed a crown of thorns on her head, and climbed onto a Cross. It wasn't enough that she has spent the past two decades besmirching the name "Madonna." Now she has to  besmirch Christ Himself, and for this she must be formally asked to leave the Church, even if she really doesn't any longer belong to it.

The self-styled "Queen of Pop" went on to pepper her two-and-a-half hour show with more controversial imagery, says Reuters, at one point showing photographs of the Pope after those of former Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.

A symbolic gesture it would be, excommunication (as far as we know, Madonna is no Sunday churchgoer), but an important one to show that Catholics -- and all of Christianity -- are not to be shoved around quite so brazenly. We saw how Rome speaking up about The DaVinci Code lessened the impact of that treacherous movie.

Love with strictness: this could become a defining moment and motif for the new papacy.

Such is suggested with reluctance but would be a good example at a time when the jokes on Christianity, and the horrible displays of it, are spreading. On a comedy show is a terrible bleeding statue of the Blessed Mother (menstruating) while late-night talk-show hosts regularly make fun of holy images, or such images are sold on eBay. Enough.

Rome already has taken very unusual and significant steps in denouncing her (Vatican Cardinal Ersilio Tonino, who spoke with the approval of the Pope, called the concert "a blasphemous challenge to the faith" and a "profanation of the Cross"), but it is time to take official steps and send a shot across the bow of Hollywood with excommunication (which Cardinal Tonino himself suggested).

Perhaps it would shock her into another look at her life and despite the odds, spark an element of repentance. Many are those who are disciplined for less. One can only pray.

This is to bear no hatred toward the singer-actress. She had a difficult rearing with no mother. Her mom died when she was but five, of breast cancer. We can pray about that. We can pray for this poor woman. And we can hope that she would contest an excommunication by formal repentance, for which an opportunity should be give.

But one should not hold one's breath and the recent display is but one in a long line of travesties. Incredible it is that this is her birth name: Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone. She was born on August 16, 1958, the day after the major feast day of the Assumption.

There is the blatantly sexual motif of her career -- all while robbing the Blessed Mother of the "Madonna" mantle -- and the fact that she named her daughter Lourdes, which at best perplexes. Is this an inner battle -- is there a side to her that hungers for her Catholic faith -- or is the devil trying to blacken everything with names?

All that can be known for sure is that Madonna's career has been spent demonstrating to young girls how to dress and act like harlots.

She was also the subject of a photographic book, Truth or Dare, in the 1980s that was outright pornography.

To continue to see this aging entertainer strutting about with the Virgin's name in such a promenade of ridicule has now gone to the point where action is necessary and would negate some of her ill effects.

No one wants to win her more publicity, but her obsession with dragging the Church into her darkness is obvious in the names of albums such as "Like a Prayer" (sung in front of a row of burning crosses), "Like a Virgin" (in which she writhes on the floor in a wedding dress) and "The Immaculate Collection."

During the 1980s, Madonna appeared in one video with a stage set up to be a Catholic church -- but with black candles. Everyone knows that such candles have the connotation of satanic ritual and so it was intriguing last week to hear another official in Rome, Vatican Bishop Velasio De Paolis, compare the singer's act to "Satanists [who] use religious objects for Black Masses." 

Satanism is more than grounds for excommunication, and even if she had not gone that far, her open occultism via promotion of kabbalah and her x-rated career in association with Mary are enough to justify major public rebuke from a Church that needs to be seen as strong in the midst of growing attack.

It took Rome many years to strip priests of their vestments in the wake of sex scandals and years for it to remove a renegade priest named Matthew Fox (who openly questioned the divinity of Jesus, and hired a practicing witch).

Sad as it is to have to work at the speed of television -- of MTV -- and with the timing of the internet, let us no longer work solely to the tick of ancient clocks.

And with all great and due respect let us suggest that the great Church that fought down heresies and survived beheadings and surfaced even under the oppression of kings show its historic mettle and come to an even stronger defense of the Virgin Mary.

[resources: Prayer of the Warrior]

[see also: Sexual lyrics prompt teens to have sex]