Threesus-Deesus

Catholics, 5 April 2007

Memo to William Donahue: HELP ME OUT, MAN.

For the longest time, one of the things that's irritated me the most about my fellow white people is their whining about the "rules changing". You know, the sentiment that basically boils down to "I finally stopped calling them 'colored', and now they don't want to be called 'black'? No fair! How can I keep up?" But now I sort of kind of understand a little bit how they feel. Well, not really. But just pretend for a bit.

Because I cannot, for the life of me, figure out what the rules are for having an acceptable statue of Jesus.

This has, as you may already be guessing, come out of the past week's kerfluffle over Chocolate Jesus, and to a lesser extent, Obama Jesus. The former was part of a New York art exhibit, the latter at a Chicago art school. Neither are apparently OK with the Catholic League's Donahue, who I guess is some sort of self-appointed arbiter (emphasis on the BITER) of religious iconography. And, to be fair, the Catholics do love their iconography. They've almost made it into an art form.

Before we delve into the questionable Jesi, let's quickly take a tour of some of the Jesus statuary that religious types have no problem with. Jesus playing sports is apparently fine. Tacky plastic on the dashboard? Fine. Huge, crucified, bloody, and hanging on the wall? Also fine. Action figure? Fine. Caucasian? Just fucking spiffy. Extending it to the Virgin Mary, depictions on food, highway underpasses, and the like are not only tolerated, but worshiped.

Chocolate Jesus is bad. For a clue as to why, I turn to the Catholic League's press release, helpfully titled "NAKED JESUS—GENITALS EXPOSED—CRUCIFIED". From this, we can make three reasonable deductions.

First, "CRUCIFIED" can't be the problem, because Catholics make statues of crucified Jesus all the time. The second is that "CHOCOLATE" doesn't appear anywhere in the headline, which surprises me. Which leads to the third deduction, that what remains - "NAKED - GENITALS EXPOSED" is the real problem. And also redundant.

I'm not sure what the problem is - historians agree that Jesus, assuming he existed and was crucified, was probably crucified naked, because the Romans didn't like to waste perfectly good tunics or whatever. Therefore, the problem must lie with Jesus' wang. I can see where this would be a problem. I mean, obviously Jesus HAD a penis. Otherwise he'd have a tough time turning wine back into water. And writing his name in the sand. But from a theosculptural standpoint, depicting the Holy Gross is tricky.

Not too small, obviously. He's the son of God, and God isn't going to under-endow the Saviour. But not too large, either, because after all, he won't be using it for much. Obviously it's going to be circumcised. One might think that God could have snipped that bit of DNA in utero to save his son some pain, but that's apparently not the kind of dad God was. Is Jesus a shower or a grower? Nobody knows, and thus it is left for the artists and the Catholic League to fight over. And whatever you do, do not inquire as to the number of licks required to get to the center. They're cranky enough as it is.

The Catholic League is much more vague about the Obama Jesus. Actually, everyone's more vague about it. I couldn't find anybody going on the record for why it's bad. I guess it's because Obama isn't Jesus. Also, he's a Democrat. You can put Bush's face on Uncle Sam and sell prints at conventions, but Democrats don't get to be Jesus. But I'm just speculating here because I'm out of jokes about Christ's chocoschlong.

And I trust the irony of BOTH of these troublesome statues being a lot closer to the alleged actual Jesus's likely skin color than anything behind glass at the Vatican is so obvious it's barely worth pointing out.

Obama Jesus seems to have been spared the censor's wrath, but Hershey's Saviour With Alm(ond)s was pulled from display by the hotel that houses the gallery. You'd think Donohue would be crying victory, but in another press release, he just bitches about the gallery owner's understandable outrage. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"“Because we did not like the way the Roger Smith Hotel handled the decision to drop the display, we have no intention of contacting the 500 organizations that we alerted to this assault on Christian sensibilities to inform them that the exhibition has been cancelled." - Bill Donohue, petulantly refusing to call off his dogs.

Now that's what I call being a dick about Jesus.