By Karen Osborne | Catholic News Service

An old friend from church once told me when I was a teenager that she thought anti-Catholicism was one of the “last acceptable prejudices.”

I protested. Wasn’t prejudice -- separate-but-equal education, voting rights only for white males, racial epithets, etc. -- gone? Didn’t most people know that it was absolutely not acceptable to look down on someone because of skin color, religion, personal habits or interests? Weren’t we,as a society,better than that?

We’ve come a long way, but we’re still fighting prejudice in a thousand forms.

A recent television commercial by Red Bull brought back this fact. To sell the energy drink, the commercial tells an old anti-Catholic joke that is severely offensive to Catholic priests and the ordinary faithful alike.

In the ad, two teenage boys watch a balding priest enter a church.

One asks his companion, “Do you really think it will work?”

“Just watch me,” the other boy replies as he downs a can of Red Bull before entering the church confessional and confessing that he has sinned by being with “a loose woman.” The priest interrupts him, guesses who the boy is, then names three different women in an effort to get the boy, who refuses to name the woman, to divulge who she was. And apparently getting the names of loose women was the boys’ goal in the first place.

An ad like this wouldn’t be tolerated if it focused on Jews or Muslims!

Many Red Bull higher-ups probably had to sign off on that ad, and reactions to the ad are proof that an undercurrent of discrimination is still active in today’s society.

In testimony in February to support a bill that would repeal in-state tuition for particular undocumented students, Kansas state representative Connie O’Brien told a House Federal and State Affairs Committee that last year she overheard a young woman tell a college counselor that she didn’t have a photo ID to confirm her identity to pick up her financial aid package. O’Brien said that she “could tell by looking at her that she was not originally from this country” because “she had the olive complexion.”

A lot of people were quick to condemn O’Brien, but the sad truth is that very few of us, including those who threw stones at the representative, are totally exempt from this kind of thinking.

For years after I was mugged at gunpoint by a young black man wearing a hoodie sweatshirt, I avoided walking on the same side of the road with people who fit his description.

The man sitting next to me recently on a flight to New York was visibly nervous when an Arab family boarded after him. He said that he hoped “they got patted down real good.”

One friend forgot that I am Catholic and went on a screed about how “all Christians are stupid” because of the things we believe about God and Jesus.

And what about the young foreign chef on my cruise ship who was surprised that I was so nice to him since “Americans are really mean”?

All of these people are probably tolerant, wonderful people. So why is all of this discrimination still going on?

Perhaps Red Bull has given us a chance to remember that we still have a long way to go in combating prejudice at home and abroad. Ignoring prejudice, whether it is overt or underhanded, is not going to make it go away.

The first place to start fixing the problem is to take a long, hard look at ourselves and how we think about others.

No form of prejudice is ever acceptable.

Karen Osborne is a columnist for Catholic News Service.