A RISQUE billboard that depicts Jesus's mother looking dejected after unsatisfying sex with Joseph has given Kiwi Catholics a nasty pre-Christmas surprise.
The huge ad erected in downtown Auckland today shows the unhappy couple in bed accompanied by the slogan: "Poor Joseph. God was a hard act to follow".
In the fresco-style work, Joseph looks down red-faced while an anguished Mary looks to the heavens.
It was the brainchild of a progressive Christian church, St Matthew's, whose vicar Archdeacon Glynn Cardy says it was a cutting-edge strategy to engage non-believers.
"Progressive Christianity is distinctive in that not only does it articulate a clear view, it is also interested in engaging with those who differ," Cardy said, with the advertisement still appearing on their website.
"Its vision is one of robust engagement," he said.
But the city's Catholic diocese is not impressed, saying the implication that Mary and Joseph had just had sex was "disrespectful" and "offensive" to Christians.
Spokeswoman Lyndsay Freer told the New Zealand Herald it was particularly inappropriate given the inference was wrong.
"Our Christian tradition of 2000 years is that Mary remains a virgin and that Jesus is the son of God, not Joseph," she said.
But statistics show New Zealanders may need such edgy advertising to help spark interest in religion.
The latest 2006 Census showed that 32.2 per cent - or 1.3 million Kiwis - profess to have no religion, up 270,000 people on the previous survey.
That's significantly more than the 18.7 per cent of Australians who ticked the No Religion box in the same year, and higher than most other Western countries worldwide.
It's not surprising that a recent atheist fundraising campaign to put controversial "No God" posters on buses was overwhelmed with donations from non-God fearing Kiwis.
The organiser, Simon Fisher, collected more than double the $NZ10,000 ($8000) he needed in just two days for the ads which read: "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life."
He said the campaign, which mimics one which ran in Britain, was designed to break religious taboos.
"Religion should not be a taboo subject that no one brings up at dinner parties," he wrote on the website
http://www.nogod.org.nz.
"We should be discussing what we believe and why."
