From Reuters we have the story of outrage at Chilean fashion designer Ricardo Oyarzun who is planning a show that dresses models in garb which borrows from the iconography of the Virgin Mary.
Chile’s Episcopal Conference offered this statement: “We look on with special pain and deplore those acts which seek to tarnish manifestations of sincere love toward the Virgin Mary, which end up striking at the dignity of womankind by presenting her as an object of consumption.”
Here are a couple observations:
1) Expressing “special pain” indicates that these wizened old virgins have far too much time on their hands. Their outrage has the effect of compounding the already deeply entrenched perception that institutional religion is an irrelevant and vacuous force in our world.
2) It is difficult to give much credence to these Bishops who claim concern that Oyarzun is “striking at the dignity of womankind by presenting her as an object of consumption.” Oh, come on! It’s their religious heritage that invented the concept! Hebrew writers knew, hundreds of years before the birth of Christ, that sex sells. They may not have put it in those terms. But they knew that the metaphorical use of sex was an excellent tool for conveying religious notions.
The Song of Solomon is an exemplar. Consider a few verses from chapter 4:
4 Your neck is like the tower of David
built in courses;
on it hang a thousand bucklers,
all of them shields of warriors.5 Your two breasts are like two fawns,
twins of a gazelle,
that feed among the lilies.
And chapter 7 uses a different comparison:
7 You are stately as a palm tree,
and your breasts are like its clusters.8 I say I will climb the palm tree
and lay hold of its branches.
O may your breasts be like clusters of the vine,
and the scent of your breath like apples.
Tits like coconuts? What a novel idea. And what’s going on here in chapter 5? Not sex! Please don’t tell me there’s explicit sex in the Bible!
3 I had put off my garment;
how could I put it on again?
I had bathed my feet;
how could I soil them?4 My beloved thrust his hand into the opening,
and my inmost being yearned for him.
The whole Magisterium is cloaked in sexual metaphor. The Roman Catholic Church styles itself as the bride waiting—well let’s be blunt here—waiting to get fucked by Christ. Metaphorically speaking of course. And we worry about a model with a boob job wearing clothes that have a slight Middle Eastern flavour to them?
I wonder what kind of pictures these old guys keep tucked away in the pages of their Songs of Solomon—assuming they can get the pages unstuck. Metaphorically speaking of course.
This kind of nonsense crops up with annoying regularity. See my post about Cosimo Cavallaro and his chocolate Jesus.