Tasteful? Well, obviously not. Bannable? Apparently, yes. This statue of a hanging man made entirely out of chocolate and drawing on a familiar religious icon for its inspiration has attracted the ire of something called the Catholic League, a non-elected body with the power to determine what the rest of us see. (It appears to be using the term catholic in its lower case sense: i.e. it welcomes bigots of all denominations.)They have two complaints. The material used: 200 lbs of chocolate. And the fact that the genitalia are visible.
There's a statue in St Peter's in Rome whose sandalled foot has been worn mirror-smooth by the hands of the faithful. Who's to say how long this artwork's choccy dick would have survived its worshippers' oral attentions?
If you'd like to know more, click here for the article in today's Guardian. In the meantime, let's hope the chocolate wasn't made by Nestlé: with the Swiss company's reputation in the third world, that really would be a thorny moral issue.
4 comments:
Giant Chocolate Jesus? Might make the whole communion business much more acceptable to non-Christians. If you're going to ritualize cannibalism, you might as well make it taste better.
If they changed the name to 'catholick" league, then this whole problem might go away. You eat the whole statue and everyone gets to go home or to church happy afterwards.
Not sure about the edible penis part. It's way too confusing at a symbolic level for me to comment on. I do assume that despite being immaculately conceived that Jesus himself was anatomically accurate. I've seen nothing in the gospels that suggest he was anything like an early version of a Ken doll. (Do Europeans know about Ken and Barbie?).
I have wondered if there is some lost gospel somewhere where we do get to see Jesus's bris. I mean who was the Godfather. What did they do with the foreskin? Talk about your really out of the ordinary relics!
If you'd like to more about Jesus's foreskin (and who wouldn't?), go to this site: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Prepuce.
A lot of renaissance paintings of the Virgin Mary with the Christ child show the child with a small but definite stiffie. A book was written about this some years ago, but I forget the title.
The book's called "The Sexuality of Christ in Renaisance Art and in Modern Oblivion" and you can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Sexuality-Christ-Renaissance-Modern-Oblivion/dp/0226771873
What are Jesus's bris?
Yes, we know about Ken.
the "bris" is the Jewish circumcision ceremony. I may have misseplled it.
I honestly had no idea that there was a whole sub-industry in Jesus's genitals.
I knew that the prototype for Barbie was a doll found in a German sex shop. I just didn't know how much Ken had been marketed worldwide.
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