Eeek, Naked Bodies On Twitter! Vatican Archbishop Blasted.

Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia has form for annoying Catholic traditionalists who find nudity abhorrent. A while back he drew fire for commissioning a ‘homoerotic’ mural for his cathedral, and now he’s in deep doo-do for an image he retweeted yesterday.

Novus Ordo Watch (“Unmasking the Modernist Varican II church”) reacted with horror yesterday beneath this headline:

Thundered NOW:

Some stories are so disgusting that one absolutely detests having to blog about them. This is one of them.

This morning, the Vatican’s president of the so-called Pontifical Academy for Life, ‘Abp.’ Vincenzo Paglia, sent a message on the social media platform Twitter that includes an image showing a nude man and a nude woman lying on the floor, surrounded by four nude little children.

The tweet in question did not originate with Paglia; he ‘merely’ retweeted it and commented on it. The tweet including the lewd image originated with the Twitter account of the John Paul II Pontifical Theological Institute (Pontificio Istituto Teologico Giovanni Paolo II).

NOW pointed out that that far-right Christian website, LifeSiteNews, provided a pixelated screenshot of Paglia’s “scandalous” image that shows two actors featured in the 2002 romantic comedy Casomai – Fabio Volo, and Stefania Rocca.

LSN itself reported that Paglia, Chancellor of the new John Paul II Pontifical Theological Institute for Marriage and Family Sciences in Rome and President of the Pontifical Academy for Life, retweeted a post that was part of a promotion of a broadcast featuring Casomai film director Alessandro D’Alatri.

It then pointed out that the archbishop paid a – gasp! – homosexual artist to paint a “blasphemous homoerotic mural” in his cathedral church in 2007.

LSN shrieked:

The massive mural still covers the opposite side of the facade of the cathedral church of the Diocese of Terni-Narni-Amelia. It depicts Jesus carrying nets to heaven filled with naked and semi-nude homosexuals, transsexuals, prostitutes, and drug dealers, jumbled together in erotic interactions.

Included in one of the nets is Paglia, the then diocesan bishop. The image of the Savior is painted with the face of a local male hairdresser, and his private parts can be seen through his translucent garb.

Who knew Catholics could have such fun?

Under the supervision of Paglia, Argentinean artist Ricardo Cinalli painted the bishop himself in one of the “erotic” nets, semi-nude and “clutching a bearded man wearing nothing but a loose loincloth.”

Cinalli also painted Fr Leonardis, then head of the Office of Cultural Heritage, as a naked, muscular man with a tattoo of a cupid’s arrow running through a heart containing the word “love,” entangled with others in one of the “erotic” nets.

Cinalli told La Repubblica that Fr Fabio, who died soon after the painting was finished while still in his fifties, was a very “open” man, but declined to say if he was gay.