"Erotic" Jesus Angers Catholics

The museum exhibits Hrdlicka's homoerotic version of Christ's Last Supper. (Photo through Google)

"People can imagine what they want to," Bernhard Boehler, the director of the Museum of Vienna's Roman Catholic Cathedral, told Reuters on Monday, April 7, in his small office, across the street from St. Stephan's Cathedral.

The museum, nestled down a narrow street in Vienna's historic Gothic quarter, is hosting an exhibition honoring Austria's cherished artist Alfred Hrdlicka, who turned 80 earlier this year.

The main picture, a homoerotic version of Christ's Last Supper, shows cavorting Apostles sprawling over the dining table and masturbating each other.

Hrdlicka, a communist and atheist, says he represented the men in this way because there are no women in the original portrayal by Leonardo da Vinci, restored by controversial Italian filmmaker and writer Paolo Pasolini' who was murdered in the 1970s.

"There was such a reaction to its physicality. For me it was quite surprising the museum wanted to show the piece in the first place," he told Reuters by telephone.

The museum's director defended both Hrdlicka's work and his decision to host is controversial versions of biblical imagery in a museum tied to the Catholic Church.

"We think Hrdlicka is entitled to represent people in this carnal, drastic way," said Boehler.

"I don't see any blasphemy here," he argued, gesturing at a crucifixion picture showing a soldier simultaneously beating Jesus and holding his genitals.

Blasphemy

The museum curators received a barrage of angry messages and calls to be shut down.

Boehler and Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, the archbishop of Vienna, have both come under fire from some museum visitors and Catholic websites.

The "Religion, Flesh and Power" exhibition has attracted fierce criticism on religion blogs in Austria and Germany as blasphemous.

"The exhibition should never have taken place," a Catholic wrote in an article on conservative website kreuz.net.

"The director should apologize to Catholics worldwide for this."

The criticism even crossed the Atlantic into the United States.

"I wouldn't have guessed that, given his reputation, a man like Schoenborn would have stood for this abomination for half a second," conservative columnist Rod Dreher wrote on his widely read religion blog.

The museum had taken down the Last Supper piece at Schoenborn's request, leaving a blank black wall at the entrance to the display.

"This has nothing to do with censorship, rather corresponds with the understood reverence for the sacred," the Cardinal's spokesman said in a statement.

"It is also an act of respect towards those believers who feel this portrayal offended and provoked them in their deepest religious sensitivity."

Boehler, like Hrdlicka, compared the debate to the Danish cartoon row triggered in 2005 when Jyllands-Posten published 12 cartoons of a man described as Prophet Muhammad, one showing him with a ticking bomb in his turban.

The drawings sparked uproar in the Muslim world and strained ties between Muslim world and the West.

"People have said the Catholic Church has become a lot more liberal," said Museum Curator Martina Judt.

"But in the end, the reactions show this perhaps isn't the case."