Cardinal Egan and William Donohue of the Catholic League
expressed their outrage at the proposed art exhibit of a naked
chocolate Jesus in a Manhattan gallery. They were successful in
raising enough opposition that the exhibit scheduled for Holy
Week was canceled. I mean no disrespect to the gentlemen, but as
far as blasphemous and disrespectful insults to our faith, I find
chocolate a lot milder than what we're used to here in New York
City. Who can forget the Brooklyn Museum's exhibit of the
dung-covered porno-collaged Virgin Mary painting by Chris Ofili?
Today is Good Friday, the most somber day of the year for
Christians. In my parish and in others, Catholics are walking
through their neighborhood streets carrying the cross to reenact
the Passion of Christ and remind us that he died for our sins.
The procession will end in the churches for the Good Friday
services, which vary in solemnity throughout the archdiocese.
Parishes with large Hispanic congregations tend to have wider
participation in the pageantry.
But as we approach Easter Sunday, our most glorious feast day and
central to our faith, I wonder how offended I should be by a
religious icon at a time when Easter has morphed into a day of
colored eggs and bunny rabbits. Was offense taken at Christ's
nudity rather than the material used in the sculpture? But there
have been other naked Christs depicted in art, so how can we
object to this evidence of his obvious humanity? Actually, what
probably provoked the Catholic League's ire was the report that
the artist had invited the public to eat the nude sculpture on
April 1. Somehow I don't think it would have been the faithful
that would have shown up to participate in this particular feast.
The local news promo came on television last week announcing that
a statue of Christ by the artist Cosimo Cavallaro was going to be
exhibited at Manhattan's Lab Gallery beginning the first day of
Holy Week and asked "Guess what it's made of ?" My
daughter cringed, expecting it to be something much worse than
chocolate. In fact, she said, "That's much more appropriate
than chocolate eggs." Come to think about it, what do the
Easter bunny and painted eggs have to do with the resurrection?
Rabbits don't lay eggs, chickens do, and were the chickens angry
when the bunny ran off with its eggs and colored them? Just
asking.
It's no secret that early Christians incorporated pagan practices
into Christian festivals. According to the Venerable Bede, an
early Christian writer, clerics copied pagan practices to make
Christianity more acceptable to pagans unwilling to give up their
festivals for the more somber Christian practices. Thus, the
spring festival to the goddess Eastre whose sacred animal was a
hare was converted into a Christian feast day. Eggs were always
associated with this and other vernal festivals as symbols of
rebirth and fertility since ancient times. So the Christian day
for memorializing the resurrection which came at the same time as
the pagan festival became Easter Sunday.
The Cardinal and Mr. Donohue are doing their jobs when they call
attention to public displays of anti-Catholicism, but as an
artist myself I'm not convinced that Mr. Cavallaro's motive was
disrespect. He called his work, "My Sweet Lord" and his
specialty is using food as material for his sculptures. Why a
chocolate Jesus? Cavallaro, who is Catholic, has stated he did it
to show his faith and get closer to his faith and religion. I'll
give him the benefit of the doubt, and I wish that his exhibit
was not canceled because of the death threats made against the
artist and his wife. Chocolate saviors and cartoon prophets
should not be inspiring death threats, and the persons who made
them to the artist were not motivated by love for Christ but by
hatred. That's not what Christianity is supposed to promote.
There are many things in society that we need to object to, but
the freedom to express religion must be protected. There's a fine
line between taking umbrage over any offense and denying someone
their expression of faith whether we agree with it or not. We
should have let the art work speak for itself and had faith in
the good taste of the public.
I checked out Mr. Cavallaro's sculpture and, frankly, I could
discern no resemblance to traditional portraits of Christ. The
pony-tailed figure in fact looked more like George Carlin taking
a skinny dip.
Happy Easter.