Reply #37: The problem is that it's always Catholics that are the subject for [View All]

satirical art (and this applies to other than just visual arts) while Jews and Muslims are off-limits. I have no problem with a sculpture suggesting that some bishops are not as virtuous as they should be. That's a perfectly valid point. But where are the sculptures of evil rabbis? I can easily Google up several cases of rabbis convicted of multiple cases of sexual abuse of children, complete with cover-ups by their Jewish communities. I'd imagine I could find cases involving Muslims as well. I know for sure about the rabbis because people have claimed in these forums that rabbis are never pedophiles so I checked it out. Despite being married, rabbis and Protestant clergy are pedophiles in percentages such as are found among the celibate Catholic clergy. A certain percentage of men are pedophiles, no matter what their career choice is. But we have heard much about Catholic priests and not a word about the rabbis (many of them Orthodox rabbis) or Protestant clergy.

The sculpture is a fine caricature of an unpleasant-looking man dressed as a bishop and there's nothing new about that. Nor is there anything new about using sexual imagery for shock effect in art. Look at the art of the Renaissance in Italy and you can see unpleasant-looking clergy and explicit sexual imagery. Artists very definitely criticized evil men in the clergy then. This, however, was when everyone was Catholic if they were Christian, so artistic statements against evil clergymen were about condemning evil people, not about condemning the entire Catholic hierarchy nor condemning the Catholic faith nor condemning/ denying God.

Today, some people confuse a relatively small number of evil men in the clergy with the whole of Catholicism. Some even confuse evil with God or at least with the church that exists to serve God (however imperfectly it may do so.) It is not because of God or because of religion that evil exists. It is because human beings have a capacity for evil. And that capacity for evil means that there are evil Protestants, evil Jews, evil Muslims, evil Buddhists, evil agnostics, evil atheists, etc., as well as evil Catholics.