Crucified Frogs and Trans Madonnas Praised by Austrian Church

Catholics back deportations; Pew finds no youth revival; girl Jesus stunts, cathedral gay blessings, and Fernández porn defended

Vienna’s Künstlerhaus, and the Churchmen who signed the guestbook

There is a particular kind of late modern blasphemy that doesn’t even bother pretending to be serious. It doesn’t argue; it snickers. It dresses mockery in grants, curates it behind glass, and then dares Christians to call it what it is.

Vienna’s Künstlerhaus is currently running an exhibition titled “Du sollst dir ein Bild machen” through February 8, 2026. It presents itself as contemporary art engaging Christian imagery, sometimes “critical,” sometimes “loving,” often “feminist,” always eager to “reinterpret” what used to be received.

That alone would be depressing but not new. The scandal is that the Austrian Church’s representatives didn’t merely tolerate it. They praised it, and the museum itself highlights those endorsements like a seal of Catholic approval.

Here is Bishop Hermann Glettler of Innsbruck, quoted in the Künstlerhaus materials as writing on Instagram that the exhibition is “absolutely worth seeing,” and that it is “evidence of the endless struggle” to do justice to the mystery of God “inscribed into a wounded world.”

Here is Vienna Cathedral’s rector, Toni Faber, also quoted in the Künstlerhaus materials, commending the show as presenting “outstanding works” in several categories “for discussion” until February 8.

Here is Jesuit priest Gustav Schörghofer, again quoted in the official exhibition page, offering the familiar catechesis of the cultured cleric: Christian shaped images can open our view toward a reality that is “terrible” and “violent,” yet where “wonder, love, tenderness, and devotion” can be discovered; art is not meant to give instructions, but to open the view toward a “mystery” perceived as the approach of a “deep love.”

And for good measure, the Archdiocese of Vienna’s weekly Der Sonntag is quoted approving the exhibition as showing how contemporary art reinterprets Christian motifs “respectfully, critically, and often surprisingly.”

Finally, the Diocese of Linz’s Kirchenzeitung, via Elisabeth Leitner, is quoted praising the curator’s “attentive and appreciative perspective,” with a specific nod to works targeting “superficial piety” and “pseudo holiness,” including Martin Kippenberger’s “Fred the Frog Rings the Bell,” and noting that the exhibition questions “male” creator figures.

This is the part that has to be said plainly. When a bishop publicly calls this sort of thing “absolutely worth seeing,” when a cathedral rector praises it as outstanding material “for discussion,” when a Jesuit supplies the mysticism flavored varnish, what you are watching is not evangelization. It is permission. The very men tasked with defending the sacred are tutoring the public in how to treat sacred imagery as raw material for critique, provocation, and ideological therapy.

Modernity has always mocked. What is new is the ecclesiastical hand holding.

The poll that accidentally catechizes

EWTN News and RealClear Opinion Research dropped a poll that, unintentionally, explains why bishops have lost so much authority. A majority of self identified Catholic voters report a favorable opinion of President Donald Trump; a majority also support broad scale detention and deportation of immigrants who are in the country illegally. More telling still, support for broad scale deportations outpaces overall Trump favorability, and it rises among weekly Massgoers.

You can already hear the familiar episcopal reply forming. Catholics must not let politics shape their conscience. Fine. Conscience is not shaped by press releases either; it is shaped by moral truth, by lived experience, by the plain sight of consequences. And on immigration, ordinary Catholics increasingly feel that their pastors have become spokesmen for a vision of society that treats borders as bigotry and law as an obstacle to compassion branding.

A lot of Catholics are not buying it, and the poll makes that visible.

The deeper embarrassment for the chanceries is the profile. Weekly Mass Catholics are more supportive of enforcement. In other words, the more a Catholic is actually in the pew, the less they want their country governed like an open house.

No revival, just a plateau in the decline

While bishops lecture the laity about borders, Pew reports there is no clear evidence of a nationwide religious resurgence. Religious decline may have plateaued in some measures since 2020, but young adults remain much less religious than older Americans, and there is no sign of a broad youth return to Christianity. The net effect of religious switching remains a loss for Christianity and a gain for the religiously unaffiliated.

Here is the detail every diocese should print and tape to the sacristy door. Among the youngest adults, a significant share have switched out of Catholicism, and only a tiny share have converted into it.

If the Church cannot keep her own children, she will not be saved by importing NGO talking points, or by treating national borders as the central moral drama of the age. The crisis is deeper. It is sacramental. It is doctrinal. It is a crisis of worship and confidence, and young people can smell the weakness.

They are not leaving because the Catechism allows juridical conditions on immigration. They are leaving because the adults in charge of the holy things often behave as if those things are negotiable.

Which brings us back to the museum.

Italy: the Nativity as a gender theory lab

In Capocastello near Avellino, a priest proposed placing a “baby girl Jesus” in the nativity scene, arguing God could have incarnated as a woman, and framing it as a provocation to stimulate reflection on women’s “access” to Holy Orders.

When you lose the sense that revelation is a given, you start treating mysteries as raw material for debate club. The Incarnation becomes a prop. Christmas becomes a canvas for whatever the current ideological itch demands. The priest calls it “reflection.” The faithful experience it as vandalism of the one season when even lapsed Catholics still know what the manger is supposed to say.

And notice the consistent logic. If God could have done it differently, if the forms are arbitrary, if the givenness of Christ’s sex is only an accident with no theological weight, then the Church is free to refashion everything else too. First the manger becomes a laboratory; then the sanctuary.

Modernity loves this because it is not a direct denial. It is the more effective move: a gentle dissolving.

Argentina: “It’s pastoral” in front of the tabernacle

A report circulating from the Cathedral of San Isidro in Buenos Aires province describes a “blessing” of two women dressed as brides in a chapel with the tabernacle present, justified with the now standard one word spell: pastoral.

The account appears as an anonymous audio testimony reposted online, so any responsible writer has to note that anonymity limits what can be verified from the outside. Still, the allegation fits the pattern that has become painfully familiar. “Pastoral” increasingly means: we do the thing and dare you to object, then we call your objection uncharitable.

This is the pastoral method of the post conciliar era: redefine resistance as cruelty; redefine scandal as “accompaniment”; redefine sin as “complexity.” And do it all with the Blessed Sacrament silently present, as if the Lord Himself has been demoted to stage décor.

Even if one grants uncertainty about the specific episode, the broader reality is no longer deniable. The moral imagination of the modern Church has been trained to treat scandal as collateral damage, so long as the slogans are compassionate and the journalists can write the word dialogue.

Fernández: the machine that defends the indefensible

And then there is the recurring saga of Víctor Manuel Fernández, whose old writings on sexuality keep resurfacing, followed by the same institutional choreography: minimize; psychologize; blame “right wing” agitators; call it skandalization; move on.

The pattern matters more than any single excerpt. A Church that once guarded sacred doctrine with fear and trembling now treats the faithful as overreacting children whenever they are scandalized by what should scandalize them. The bureaucratic instinct is always to protect the apparatus, to protect the appointment, to protect the narrative that nothing is really wrong, that everything is a media frenzy.

This is why Catholics stop listening. Not because they are too political. Because they have eyes.

When the faithful are told to submit on prudential matters, while the same leaders supervise a moral and aesthetic collapse, they begin to conclude that obedience has been redefined into something unrecognizable: not obedience to God, but obedience to the public relations needs of a regime.

The real border crisis is spiritual

The Church in the West is not collapsing because too many Catholics believe the state has rights. She is collapsing because too many churchmen act as if dogma has no teeth, sacrilege is an art form, and “pastoral” is a permission slip.

The immigration poll is not merely a political datapoint. It is a warning flare: the laity have begun to distrust their own official voices, not out of rebellion, but because those voices keep demanding submission to prudential programs while presiding over a Church where the manger is rewritten, the sanctuary is desacralized, and the next scandal is always someone else’s fault.

Vienna’s exhibition is the perfect icon of the age. The world mocks; the Church’s representatives praise the mockery; then the same representatives wonder why young adults walk away, why Catholics ignore their political sermons, why confidence collapses.

At some point Catholics will insist on a basic exchange. If you want the faithful to listen, stop teaching them that everything sacred is negotiable.

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