Cardinal Egan and William Donohue of the Catholic League expressed their outrage at the proposed art exhibit of a naked chocolate Jesus in a Manhattan gallery. They were successful in raising enough opposition that the exhibit scheduled for Holy Week was canceled. I mean no disrespect to the gentlemen, but as far as blasphemous and disrespectful insults to our faith, I find chocolate a lot milder than what we’re used to here in New York City. Who can forget the Brooklyn Museum’s exhibit of the dung-covered porno-collaged Virgin Mary painting by Chris Ofili?

Today is Good Friday, the most somber day of the year for Christians. In my parish and in others, Catholics are walking through their neighborhood streets carrying the cross to reenact the Passion of Christ and remind us that he died for our sins. The procession will end in the churches for the Good Friday services, which vary in solemnity throughout the archdiocese. Parishes with large Hispanic congregations tend to have wider participation in the pageantry.

But as we approach Easter Sunday, our most glorious feast day and central to our faith, I wonder how offended I should be by a religious icon at a time when Easter has morphed into a day of colored eggs and bunny rabbits. Was offense taken at Christ’s nudity rather than the material used in the sculpture? But there have been other naked Christs depicted in art, so how can we object to this evidence of his obvious humanity? Actually, what probably provoked the Catholic League’s ire was the report that the artist had invited the public to eat the nude sculpture on April 1. Somehow I don’t think it would have been the faithful that would have shown up to participate in this particular feast.

The local news promo came on television last week announcing that a statue of Christ by the artist Cosimo Cavallaro was going to be exhibited at Manhattan’s Lab Gallery beginning the first day of Holy Week and asked “Guess what it’s made of ?” My daughter cringed, expecting it to be something much worse than chocolate. In fact, she said, “That’s much more appropriate than chocolate eggs.” Come to think about it, what do the Easter bunny and painted eggs have to do with the resurrection? Rabbits don’t lay eggs, chickens do, and were the chickens angry when the bunny ran off with its eggs and colored them? Just asking.

It’s no secret that early Christians incorporated pagan practices into Christian festivals. According to the Venerable Bede, an early Christian writer, clerics copied pagan practices to make Christianity more acceptable to pagans unwilling to give up their festivals for the more somber Christian practices. Thus, the spring festival to the goddess Eastre whose sacred animal was a hare was converted into a Christian feast day. Eggs were always associated with this and other vernal festivals as symbols of rebirth and fertility since ancient times. So the Christian day for memorializing the resurrection which came at the same time as the pagan festival became Easter Sunday.

The Cardinal and Mr. Donohue are doing their jobs when they call attention to public displays of anti-Catholicism, but as an artist myself I’m not convinced that Mr. Cavallaro’s motive was disrespect. He called his work, “My Sweet Lord” and his specialty is using food as material for his sculptures. Why a chocolate Jesus? Cavallaro, who is Catholic, has stated he did it to show his faith and get closer to his faith and religion. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt, and I wish that his exhibit was not canceled because of the death threats made against the artist and his wife. Chocolate saviors and cartoon prophets should not be inspiring death threats, and the persons who made them to the artist were not motivated by love for Christ but by hatred. That’s not what Christianity is supposed to promote.

There are many things in society that we need to object to, but the freedom to express religion must be protected. There’s a fine line between taking umbrage over any offense and denying someone their expression of faith whether we agree with it or not. We should have let the art work speak for itself and had faith in the good taste of the public.

I checked out Mr. Cavallaro’s sculpture and, frankly, I could discern no resemblance to traditional portraits of Christ. The pony-tailed figure in fact looked more like George Carlin taking a skinny dip.

Happy Easter.