Posted on 12/15/2005 12:03:54 PM PST by marshmallow
Vetting advertisements for a magazine is always a little tricky. Editors have a financial responsibility to keep the publication going, and it’s a fairly well-established practice in the trade to accept ads that don’t necessarily match the magazine’s editorial line—I suppose on the principle that if, say, the people at MoveOn.Org somehow believe their money is well spent trawling for converts with an ad in the John Birch Society’s newsletter, it’s not the business of the John Birch Society to correct them.
Still, there are limits. Take, for example, the ad on page 36 of the December 5 issue of America magazine. No, not the one urging us to “search: deeper” and “plunge into God” by enrolling at Loyola Marymount University, or the one about the College of New Rochelle needing “Assistant Deans (2).” The one, rather, that shows a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary, eight and a half inches high, wrapped in a condom.
At least I think what the ad describes delicately as “a delicate veil of latex” is a condom. It covers the statue from head to foot, with a little reservoir knob on top, all forming a “unique contemporary religious art work for sale,” which “Chelsea College of Art London Sculptural Artist Steve Rosenthal” has named “Extra Virgin.” It can be yours for “$300 (plus shipping from UK).” America is “published by Jesuits of the United States,” as it says on the magazine’s masthead, and the issue appeared just in time for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception.
You know, if Robert Mapplethorpe had stuck a statue of the virgin Mary up his b*** instead of a bullwhip he would have achieved god-like status in the art world. Instead, he just reached the "provocative" level. Oh well, opportunity missed.
I thought the Pope had put this sewer of a magazine under new management.
The Saints preserve us.
There are some who take the orthodox Catholic view that images of Our Lady with condoms is bad. There are others to whom it is not a big deal and certainly not, to quote Mayor Menino of Boston, a matter of doctrine. Who are we at "America," a magazine in the "Jesuit" tradition (but certainly not Catholic tradition), to judge which is the correct view or the incorrect view? Orthodoxy is just one opinion among many...
Wow!
"We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long stretches of peace we are not afraid.
We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us; we laugh.
But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond; and on these faces there is no smile..."
Hilaire Belloc
The protestant FReeper has at least the possible poor excuse of not knowing any better ... This sacrilege is coming from people who have no excuse; they must surely know that what they're doing is an abhomination.
This is beyond my capacity to actually take in!
That's art? That probably took a minute to put together.
WHAAAT?!?
Damage control...
The homosexual activists opine so, and unfortunately for the Church and those of us in that Church, that review is the antithesis of even moderate good mental health.
The reviewer is not only misguided but ill.
Thanks, though, for that informative link.
I don't believe them.
Good job on the emailing, sister. Would I be too cynical in thinking the response was classic CYA?
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