Alfred Hrdlicka (1928-  ) is a famed Viennese artist, whose latest exhibition, “Religion, Flesh and Power” is currently featured at Vienna’s Catholic St Stephens Cathedral, and it’s apparently about the “carnality of religion.” How “carnal?” Er, well, it shows Christ being flagellated and pleasured at the same time, and the Last Supper shows the Twelve Disciples eating each other, rather than the repast spread around them.

Who is Hrdlicka, though? For the benefit of those outside his native Austria, I decided to consult Wikipedia and discovered the following about this fascinating figure. Initially, he trained as a dentist (1943-1945), before studying art at the Academie der Bildenden Kunst (1945-1952), then sculpture (1952-1957), before his first exhibition (1960) and then featured as a representative of Austria at the prestigious Biennale international showcase of world art in 1964.

It isn’t the first time that he’s attracted controversy, although his heart is in the right place. In 1988, he constructed the Monument Against War and Fascism, which is a structure that commemorates those Austrians slaughtered in their share of the Nazi Holocaust, with only a Jewish streetscrubber present to explicitly demonstrate the role of anti-Semitism in the greatest atrocity known to humanity. Veteran Jewish Nazi-hunter Simon Weisenthal said that he was dissatisfied with the relative neglect of Jewish suffering within the Monument, and the use of the street-scrubber as a bench for those oblivious to its significance.

In 2008, he opened a retrospective of his work, and recently celebrated his eightieth birthday. I have no idea of his sexual orientation, but it doesn’t really matter. This whole latest controversy appears to be one of those perennial furores that blow up whenever someone dares to suggest that Christianity’s central figure could have had (gasp!!!) homoerotic feelings and a sex life with other men. Before this, Andre Serrano’s “Piss Christ” had a crucifix suspended in a vial of the artists urine, Godard’s “Hail Mary” was a metaphor for the life of a young modern French woman supposedly equivalent to the BVM, Te Papa’s Virgin in a Condom debate,  there’s the old chestnut about the imaginary gay erotic video Him which allegedly shows a gay Christ, and of course, the late Morton Smith and his comments about the allegedly possible gay sexual initiation of a young man in the gnostic Secret Gospel of Mark.

Predictably, the Catholic Right has gone supernova over this, and is currently bombarding St Stephens Cathedral with arguments against the display of this profane art, which has evidently touched the raw nerve of conservative Catholic erotophobia and homophobia through daring to comment about the fact that Jesus was supposed to have incarnated as a human being and felt human physical sensations. When I read the item in the UK Daily Telegraph, I noticed that there was a reference to clergy paedophilia, which many conservative Catholics either ignore, minimise or believe is an anti-Catholic conspiracy.

To me, it symbolises a potent paradox. The Catholic Church needs to change its central propositions about gender and sexuality. Frankly, who cares about the content of mere artwork when faced with the far more serious issues attendant on clerical abuse of pastoral responsibility, duty of care, child rape and psychological trauma in manifold cases of clergy paedophilia?  Ending human suffering should be more important to anyone of any humanist sensibilities, religious or secular, instead of taking umbrage and trying to censor questioning work that highlights conservative Catholicism’s body/spirit dualism.