The Vatican’s newspaper L’Osservatore Romano congratulated “The Simpsons” on its 20th anniversary, the Associated Press reports.

Without Homer Simpson and his gang, "many today wouldn’t know how to laugh," the paper said in article titled "Aristotle’s Virtues and Homer’s Doughnut."

While the paper wasn’t too thrilled with the show’s "excessively crude language, the violence of certain episodes or some extreme choices by the scriptwriters,” overall, the writers said, Homer’s attitude toward God and religion are "a mirror of the indifference and the need that modern man feels toward faith."

–Elizabeth Jensen