In poor taste, yeah, but I don’t think that quite rises to the level of “lurid” or disgusting.”
You know, I understand humor, satire, caricature, and the like. I also know that humor is in the eye of the beholder. What is a joke to some may be an insult to others.
When the Simpsons ran a satire of Dan Brown and Lisa became a nun in a local Springfield convent to “break the code” and the front door of the convent had a sticker of a screaming Virgin Mary saying “scram,” I laughed. When South Park took aim at her menses I didn’t.
When I read the joke with the punch line “God is a hard act to follow” I also laughed and thought that, as written and as intended, it DOES make a sane, healthy, and correct doctrinal point. But when the punch line was scribbled over a picture of Our Lady in bed looking flustered and Joseph looking frustrated, I didn’t laugh for one second.
What’s the difference?
You see, in this day and age when exhibitionism and voyeurism is the order of the day, and everything is sexualized, we lose sight of the fact that sex, to a Christian, is a sacred act. Yet, the Master himself stated that the most excellent way is to refrain from marriage for the sake of the Kingdom.
We Catholics believe, and think that Scripture does support, the notion that Mary and Joseph decided for elected chastity and virginity without losing sight of the excellence of marital relations. They just moved beyond them. Their sexual abstinence has nothing do with sexual repression, but with love, albeit another kind of love, possible only by God’s grace. And God’s grace is given quietly, in silence, and intimately, in a way that the pruriently curious will never understand or accept.
Elected virginity is also a escathological sign, that is, it points to the Parousia, the End of Time. It’s a mark of a people who underwent one Advent season and then fell in the throes of another, definitive Advent for which this ongoing season is just but a preparation and a reminder. We are a people of the First and Second Advents and many await them by sacrificing their procreative powers for the sake of that Kingdom that is both to come and within us.
This billboard was a fragrant attempt to pry into the mystery of this grace; it turned the marital bed of Mary and Joseph into a circus freak act; it aimed to destroy the very mystery present in a unique marriage in the history of man. It was also an attempt to destroy the mystery by soiling it in such away as to make perversely disgusting the mere thought that there is such a thing, such a vocation, such a grace as elected virginity.
I, in turn, find the blatant inversion of values perpetrated by this “church” despicable and disgusting in itself. Their point about the true meaning of Christmas could have been made a thousand different ways without bringing the God of Israel to the level of Zeus and without stressing the biological so much in order to make the Incarnation and its consequences - to Mary, Joseph, to the rest of us - trivial and unimportant.
This is why I find this thing so offensive, hurtful, and degrading, not only for Those portrayed, but also for the rest of us who have to suffer it. Shame on them. May the Lord forgive them; and may the Lord grant me the grace to forgive them now, at this very moment.
-Theo