This letter was abridged. The deleted sections are underlined below.
Your editorial “The Power of Beauty” (NZ Catholic, July 1), defends
the indefensible.
New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art is showing priceless sacred vestments, papal
robes from the Sistine Chapel and treasures from the Vatican, including a tiara
given to Pope Pius IX by Queen Isabella II of Spain, alongside papal and
episcopal fashion, cinch-waisted, designed for women, even an S&M bondage
mask decorated with rosary beads.
This blasphemous conflation of the sacred and profane was funded largely by
gay icon Versace’s fashion empire. The curator is gay, and admitted
the exhibition was meant as ‘a provocation’.
Well, I am provoked. Even more provoked by the gala opening, where Rihanna
came wearing a mini and bishop’s mitre. Anne Hathaway’s cardinal outfit was
backless, with cleavage. Lana del Ray’s dress parodied Our Lady of Sorrows.
Jared Leto had a golden crown of thorns; Madonna wore crucifixes and little
else.
The Catholic clergy and faith were caricatured; American Catholics were
not just provoked but scandalized. 600 turned up at a rally to protest.
But ‘special guest’ Cardinal Timothy Dolan was “honoured to be there”. He
“couldn’t really see anything sacrilegious”.
Maybe because the Met gala and
exhibit are “unfruitful works of darkness”, in which Catholics as “children of
the light” ... must “take no part, but instead expose them” (Eph 5:7,11).
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