Restoring My Foreskin

“Pasja” (Passion) - Dorota Nieznalska - 2002 

“Passion” was an artistic installation merging the themes religion, masculinity, sex and suffering.  It consisted of a large metal cross suspended from the ceiling, and a silent video projection taken from an overhead angle, of the face and shoulders of a grimacing man in the act of weight-lifting.

The viewer’s inability to behold the man’s body, concocted an effect of ambiguity as to the activity of the man on the screen, suggesting that his torment could have been as a result of some other kind of activity.  The photograph of the genitalia affixed to the cross diagnoses sexuality as the prime purpose of torturous suffering; suffering enables accomplishment of a state of sexual mega-potency and achievement of hyper-phallicism of the toned-up male body.  The cross is a traditional symbol of suffering and redemption, redemption through suffering; it associates itself with the male body, with the crucifixion of naked Christ.  Agonizing pain, masculinity, nudity and the cross are all lined up in one grid of interrelations.

As all Christians should know, from the existence of the Holy Prepuce, Jesus was circumcised; but in the ensuing controversy, the installation would mistakenly be described by some as depicting “the penis of Christ”.   

The display was condemned as immoral and blasphemous by Catholics.   Members of the far-right Catholic League of Polish Families attacked Nieznalska in the Wyspa gallery.  She was physically assaulted by The All-Polish Youth, the League’s skinhead militia, who threatened to hang her.  The group exhibition at which the installation was presented was closed down by the authorities and she was charged under blasphemy laws and faced two years in prison.  Nieznalska had her scholarships and subsidies cut off, and for years the League closed exhibitions that displayed her work.

After a ten-month trial in 2002/2003, during which all testemony by expert witnesses in art history, law, and religion proposed by the defence were summarily excluded, she was found guilty of “offending religious feelings”.  The judge sentenced her to a half-year “restriction of freedom,” ordered her to do community work, and to pay the substantial costs of the trial.  The Wyspa Gallery, the oldest and most distinguished non-profit organisation in Gdañsk, was closed as punishment.

Calcata - The last home of the Holy Foreskin of Jesus

In 1557 the Holy Prepuce was discovered in Calcata, a clifftop medieval village about 30 miles north of Rome.  The relic had been hidden there by an imprisoned German soldier after the sack of Rome in 1527.

The Holy Prepuce of Calcata was officially venerated by the Catholic Church, with the Vatican’s offering to forgive 10 years worth of sins for pilgrims who went to pray to the Holy Foreskin of Jesus.  Nuns and monks from nearby villages and monasteries made candlelit processions.  Calcata became the must-see destination on the pilgrimage map, and for centuries, lines of pilgrims stretched from the church doors to beyond the walls of the fortress town. 

All was well until 1856, when the abbey of Charroux in France claimed that a workman repairing the abbey had found a reliquary containing their missing Holy Foreskin hidden inside a wall.  This set off a fierce theological clash that was solved in 1900 by the pope decreeing that henceforth, anyone who wrote about or even spoke about the Holy Prepuce would be excommunicated. 

54 years later, when a monk wanted to include Calcata in a pilgrimage tour guide, Vatican officials didn’t just reject the proposal ,they upped the punishment: now, anyone uttering its name would face the harshest form of excommunication, vitandus excommunicate (infamous and to be avoided).  They did however conclude that Calcata’s holy foreskin was more legitimate than other claimants.

In Calcata the Holy Prepuce continued to be displayed in an annual procession on the Day of the Holy Circumcision (1st January) until it was reportedly stolen in 1983.  Some suggest it ended up on the relics black market; some even suggest Satanists or neo-Nazis are responsible.  Most however suspect the Vatican as the likely culprit since the 20th-century church had begun to feel a bit bashful about its flock fawning over the 2,000-year-old tip of the redeemer’s manhood.  No one is speaking, citing the 1954 threat of excommunication.