The heart of a pig in church, blasphemy sold as art. Bishop unpunished.

Cathcon has already covered this story but this is an eloquent article on the whole situation which appeared in Italy.  See extensive coverage

Monsignor Glettler, Bishop of Innsbruck, has a blow-up of a pig's heart displayed above the High Altar of a church, apparently wrapped in a condom. And the horrors, passed off as art, in the Austrian diocese are among many others. Growing discontent among the faithful. Yet the bishop remains unpunished.

The Bishop of Innsbruck, Monsignor Hermann Glettler, has decided that during Lent the faithful cannot pray in the Churches of the Tyrolean capital. Not a formal order, but a force of repulsion that pushes the faithful to go elsewhere. Because a blow-up of a pig's heart above the high altar can only inspire devotion in a psychopath. Yet in the Diocese of Innsbruck reality surpasses fantasy. Worse.

To the poor believer who crosses the door of the church of the Innsbruck hospital, this "work of art" by Mr. Peter Garmusch, self-proclaimed artist and called by the bishop to exhibit his masterpiece in the aforementioned church for the entire duration of Lent. Perhaps to encourage the spirit of penance. Garmusch explains that it is the representation of the human heart, oscillating between its vastness and its narrowness, symbolized by a rubber band in the middle. The artist reassures everyone, combining his work with the classic representation of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, surrounded by thorns. Blasphemous.

To tell the truth, to many observers, already sufficiently disgusted by the photo and even more so by Garmusch's explanations, the lower half of the pig's heart is wrapped in a casing that looks so much like a condom. Maybe. Certainly, it would not be the first time that Glettler decides to host in a church, in a predominant position, an allusive image of sexually reprehensible conduct. Last year, again for Lent, above the altar of the university church dedicated to San Giovanni, one could admire the blow-up of the chest and arm of a naked tattooed man, lying on a bed. The Bishop of Innsbruck had explained that it was "David, half Ukrainian - shown in the photo exhausted (or simply calm?)", who in those days was "demonstrating in the Georgian capital against the madness of war". The connection with Lent? «The theme is collective and personal effort, but also gathering strength for resistance. Lent is a time for returning to oneself, for purification, for becoming aware of the need and for "ascending" with the strength of faith". That David is half Ukrainian may well be. Too bad, however, that he was demonstrating for another "noble" cause, evidently which escaped (voluntarily?) the Bishop: the closure of a nightclub in the capital of Georgia!

Let's go back to Lent a. D. 2023. The horrors in the churches of Innsbruck are not limited to the heart of the piglet. In the cathedral another “artist”, Christian Eisenberger, has assembled three huge wooden Kalashnikovs; all around the clouds of cartoons, with the writing: "Boom", "Woom", "Zack". Diabolic style. Obviously, the interpretation is free, since it is contemporary art... But the art historian Elisabeth Larcher, organizer of the contemporary art exhibition in the Churches of Tyrol, understands it as a denunciation of the invasion of weapons in the sphere of the sacred: "When the Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill says that the war against Ukraine is sacred, then I wonder where we are2.

We too wonder where we are, but for other reasons. Especially when you see that a modern dance of death by the artist Christian Eisenberger is represented above the High Altar of the Serviti church. Long sheets one meter high, with dancing skeletons, frozen men, rifles, and in the upper left corner, the Batman logo, a sign - they say - of nostalgia for a saviour.

Discontent among the faithful is growing. In the comments to the news, disgust, anger and even exhortations to imitate the Catholics of Vorarlberg rebound, who have already gathered for some time not to pay the Kirchenbeitrag, the odious (and hated) compulsory tax that Catholics must pay if they want to receive the Sacraments. A modern and institutionalised version of simony. Father Ignaz Steinwender, a priest of the Diocese of Salzburg, took a stand on the microphones of Radio Maria - Austria against these insults to God and to the religious sense of the faithful. Even people "far from the Church see with surprise and even terror that we Catholics allow the Blessed Sacrament to be provoked by the so-called "art" in the most sacred area". And he urges Catholics to react: "Every confirmed person could say: I am obliged by the catechism to defend the faith and therefore also the Sacrament". In this regard, Steinwender recalled a sad but tremendously true "prophecy" by Josef Pieper, who observed that in a society the marriage between the boundless pursuit of entertainment and the inability to be angry justly is a sign of its end.

Archbishop Glettler is the most eloquent expression of the total loss of the sense of God and of that arrogant clericalism which does not hesitate to trample on the sensitivity of the faithful, who would like to do nothing more than go to church to pray, without practicing ruminations for interpret a work of presumed art, which is in the wrong place, at the wrong time. Because churches are not museums and the art present in sacred places must respond "to the faith, piety and norms religiously handed down" and which are "suitable for sacred use" (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 122). The Dicastery for Divine Worship, which is responsible for intervening on these serious questions, should also know this. Only if they had some time between rescripts against Catholics going to the old Mass.

Glettler, on the other hand, since Pope Francis appointed him bishop of Innsbruck in 2017, has done nothing but edify his faithful with his creativity: from the upside-down Crucifix, whose arms become the hands of the clock, to the of the Via Crucis, replaced by his photographic "art"; then the crucified frog and the transparent chasuble in PVC (all documented by Messainlatino). Blasphemous representations, which only he and his clique of "scholars" like. For the record: Glettler goes unpunished. But this is no longer news.

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