Patrick Kielty will join Irish comedians Ardal O’Hanlon and Tommy Tiernan in a group of 100 entertainers who have been invited to the Vatican this Friday for an audience with Pope Francis.
The Co Down native – alongside the Father Ted and Derry Girls stars – will meet with the Pope on Friday morning, before His Holiness heads to Puglia for the G7 leaders’ summit.
A Vatican statement says that the event is taking place as the pope “recognises the significant impact that the art of comedy has on the world of contemporary culture”.
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US A-listers such as Whoopi Goldberg, Jimmy Fallon, Conan O’Brien and Chris Rock are also on the list of invited participants.
“The meeting between Pope Francis and the world’s comedians aims to celebrate the beauty of human diversity and to promote a message of peace, love and solidarity,” the Vatican said.
The audience has been organised by the Vatican’s Dicastery for Culture and Education and Dicastery for Communication.
The invite will be the first for Dundrum-born Kielty, who has hosted RTE’s Late Late Show since last year, but might not be as ironic as the meeting could be for O’Hanlon and Tiernan.
The former famously played Fr Dougal Maguire in Channel 4’s cult classic Father Ted, whose character, among other things, questioned the Catholic religion as a whole and at one point forgot he was a priest.
Meanwhile, during Tommy Tiernan’s first appearance on The Late Late Show in 1997, his controversial routine based on the crucifixion caused hundreds of complaints to flood in for the Irish state broadcaster.
Some considered the stand-up performance to be blasphemous. He won the Perrier Prize at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1998 with a routine largely based on his experiences following the broadcast.
This was all, of course, before Patrick Kielty’s time as the face of the world’s second longest-running late-night talk show.