Homo-Modernist Austrian 'bishop' displays pig heart in condom and naked trans activist above Altars
The Daily Knight
Bishop Hermann Glettler of the Diocese of Innsbruck installed the so-called 'lenten cloth' in the 18th century Innsbrucker Spitalskirche.
INNSBRUCK, Austria (LifeSiteNews) — An Austrian bishop will remove from one of his churches a highly controversial “lenten cloth” that has caused outrage amongst faithful Catholics.
The cloth shows a pig heart half covered by a condom, and Austrian Catholics might file a criminal complaint against their bishop for “disparagement of religious teachings.”
Bishop Hermann Glettler of the Diocese of Innsbruck installed the so-called “lenten cloth” in the 18th century “Innsbrucker Spitalskirche”(i.e. hospital church). He previously defended it as an “attempt to create a dialogue with contemporary art” and stressed that the image is “of course” not a depiction of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
However, the anger of faithful Catholics was seemingly too much for the prelate, leading Glettler to announce on Tuesday that he will “take down the work of art before Holy Week” as “a sign of reconciliation,” the local newspaper Tiroler Tageszeitung reported.
The Bishop of Innsbruck is under pressure by his critics. In fact, he is facing legal charges on two accounts. Firstly, faithful Catholics are thinking about filing a criminal complaint against Gletter for “disparagement of religious teachings,” according to kath.net. Secondly, local politician Gerald Depaoli announced that he will file a legal complaint against Glettler because the bishop made public the email addresses of all his critics in his response email. This means that Glettler may have violated the Austrian Data Protection Regulation.
A few days earlier, Glettler had lashed out at the conservative Catholic news site kath.net, which covered the story and criticized the Austrian bishop. He claimed that “this platform is manipulative and hateful in its reporting.” The bishop furthermore alleged that he received “very much positive feedback” for the “artwork.” He did not providing any proof of this, however.
This was not the first time that Glettler displayed a heterodox “artwork” in one of his churches. Last year, the bishop installed a giant photograph of a half-naked pro-LGBT activist in a Catholic Church in Innsbruck. In 2019, the bishop allowed a “Jesus clock” made from an upside-down corpus with broken arms to be installed in a church.
Glettler is known for his heterodoxy. He has publicly called for “blessings” for same-sex couples and condoned an active homosexual lifestyle. He furthermore said in 2020 that the Church’s doctrine that women cannot be ordained as priests is an “inequality” that is “difficult to justify.” In 2019, he hosted seminars for divorced and “remarried” couples living in adultery in which he allowed the couples to receive Holy Communion and a “celebration of reconciliation and of blessing.”
The model's Instagram account shows many equivocal pictures of trans men, tortured faces, and homosexuals kissing, as well as a post about how abortion is a 'sacral' act
(LifeSiteNews) – The Catholic bishop of Innsbruck, Austria, inaugurated a “Lenten” decoration of the main altar of the historic University church of Saint John Nepomuk, a baroque jewel from the early 18th century. The “decoration” shows an enlarged partial inverted photograph of a naked young man with scars and tattoos lying on a bed and has been placed as an altarpiece above the tabernacle of the former main altar of the church. The piece of contemporary art by Carmen Brucic was specially chosen by Bishop Hermann Glettler, and bears the title: “Tired.”
Bishop Glettler has campaigned for the blessing of same-sex couples in the past (more on that later).
In itself, the more-than-life-size picture (4.5 by 3 meters) is completely incongruous over an altar because it has no religious meaning. But the picture of this nude young man lying on his back in an exhausted attitude, barely missing the display of his genitalia, is doubly scandalous. Besides its obvious indecency in such a setting, it portrays a prominent figure of the “queer” scene in Tbilisi, thus openly glorifying a “gay” activist from Georgia whose image will remain over the tabernacle holding the Real Presence of Our Lord in the Eucharist until the end of Lent.
The said young man, David Apakidze, 23, is half Georgian, half Ukrainian – a somewhat obvious way of presenting the photo installation as a reflection on the current Russian invasion of Ukraine. But he is better known as an activist of the Bassiani club where Georgian homosexuals, drag queens and other self-proclaimed promoters of sexual deviancy had found a “safe space” for techno music, rave parties, and “LGBTQ” performances. The club was founded in 2014 and hosted performances that can only be qualified as hellish. In May 2018, the club was raided by police and closed. Many later joined a public protest dubbed “rave-o-lution days” with crowds dancing non-stop in the streets to techno music. The club was reopened but closed again for many months due to COVID restrictions.
At this time, Apakidze became a member of the “queer Georgian art collective” dedicated to “destroying toxic social norms.”
“Tbilisi-based queer art collective Fungus thrive amid hostility. By creating unapologetically bold art and a supportive community, the group of 20 artists are carving out a safe space for queer youth in a society seeking to marginalize them. ‘Fungus thrives in damp and dark places,’ the group’s manifesto reads. ‘It plays a vital role in the ecology of the biosphere. By decomposing any organic matter, it creates rich soil. A counterculture prospers similarly,” explained The Calvert journal, an online magazine “exploring the contemporary culture and creativity of the New East: Eastern Europe and the Balkans.
“Fungus,” “a very left-wing, liberal base” was formed to hold a queer art show alongside the Tbilisi Mercedes-Benz fashion week one year ago. The plan was stalled by COVID restrictions but the group went on to organize many events linked to the “Rave Revolution.”
This is where Carmen Brucic, the Tyrolean photographer who was approached by Bishop Glettler to contribute to his “tired? lost? displaced?” art show that consists in the display of three “installations” in as many churches in Innsbruck this Lent. The bishop appears to have appreciated an exhibition she set up at the Tbilisi Photo Festival in Georgia in the summer of 2021: under the title “Private Stages,” it portrayed five activists of the “Rave Revolution.” Apakidze was one of them.
Brucic chose to shoot her pictures of the young man in all his “fragility,” lying naked on a bed, adopting different poses. The photo chosen by Bishop Glettler focuses on Apakidze’s inclined face, chest and outstretched arm in a way that apes an inverted Crucifixion, showing the activist’s pierced nipple and multiple tattoos and scars on his inner arms due to self-harm.
Contemporary art always asks for discussion because what the “discourse” about installations are part and parcel of every opus. In this case, it was Bishop Glettler who got the ball rolling by proclaiming that “the photo of the young man in the picture is from characterized by suffering and aggression against oneself.” The photo is “an expression of exhaustion and resistance,” he said, adding that “it is an ambivalence that was interesting to us. The arm forms a kind of ‘V’ as for ‘victory.’ In this respect, it is a very strong fasting and Easter symbol!”
The bishop cannot have ignored Carmen Brucic’s other work, dark and tortured, abounding in images of death, waste, and de-structured human figures. Nor can he have missed the short video showing the artist’s work for the Tbilisi Festival, with its images of transexual men and the full series of the homo-erotic shots of Apakidze.