OH, FOR THE LOAF OF GOD!
School statue shrouded in controversy
A Catholic school was forced to exorcise a new statue of a saint handing bread to a young boy — because the unfortunate position of the loaf below the saint’s waist suggested something deeply sacrilegious.
Blackfriars Priory School in Adelaide — Australia’s “City of Churches” — apologized Wednesday for the “suggestive” granite work of Saint Martin de Porres.
“Upon arrival, the threedimensional statue was deemed by the [school] to be potentially suggestive,” Simon Cobiac, principal of the boys school, said in a statement.
“As a consequence, the statue was immediately covered and a local sculptor has been commissioned to redesign it.”
The sculpture, honoring the patron saint of racial harmony, was commissioned from an artist in Vietnam, and designs were approved by the school’s executive committee in May, according to Cobiac.
But after the piece was unveiled Friday, snickering students at the K-12 institution started spreading photos of the unholy effigy on social media,
The school covered the work with a black tarp (inset) until a local artist can “substantially” alter it, Cobiac wrote — but not before the image went viral on social media.
“Is that a small loaf of bread, or are you just happy to see me?” one commenter wrote below the image on the @S--tAdelaide Instagram page.
“This is the first time bread has been unappealing to me in my whole life,” wrote another.
Some commenters also made the link between the unseemly statue and the school’s history of pedophile teachers.
In 2005, a retired Blackfriars headmaster admitted to abusing four teens in the 1970s and ’80s, and a former teacher confessed to assaulting seven boys around the same time period, according to ABC Australia.