Catholic museum explores church and sex in ‘Damned Lust’

 

MUNICH – It’s certainly not what you would expect from a museum run by the Catholic Church. In southern Germany, a notoriously conservative region, the archdiocese of Munich and Freising is putting on a new show on the church’s relationship with sex.

Dubbed “Damned Lust – Church.  Body. Art,” the new exhibit in the city of Freising was conceived by Munich’s archbishop, Cardinal Reinhard Marx, himself.

A high-profile figure in the German Catholic Church, Marx commissioned a report released last year that highlighted a number of cases in which the Church did not seek legal action against priests accused of sexual abuse in the region.

Marx was also accused of improperly dealing with abuse claims.

The archbishop is scheduled to open the exhibit himself on Saturday. The current debate on how the Catholic Church deals with sexual abuse has not only revealed issues such as the abuse of power but also a fundamental problem – “the often very strained relationship of many people in our church to physicality and sexuality,” Marx writes in the foreword to the exhibition catalogue.

In the past, sermons and pastoral practice often painted a very negative picture of human sexuality, characterized by guilt and atonement, which led to repression and double standards, the archbishop said.

The exhibition, which features more than 150 artworks from antiquity to the early 19th century, manages to expose these double standards in impressive fashion.

Portrayals of a penitent but very lascivious Mary Magdalene commissioned by churchmen, for example, expose the “male phantasies” at play here, according to museum director Christoph Kürzeder.