Just typical Hollyweird if you ask me.
BTW, he excluded Mecca from his destruction film because he feared the Islamic backlash.
The point of the Catholic references is to portray the Church as an impotent fraud, and the faith of its members as insupportable superstition which is incapable of saving even the most faithful adherents at a time of true crisis. The Church will survive the mocking slurs of this hollywood lowlife, just as it has time and time before.