Controversy
As the exhibition toured Sweden, primarily in churches and congregations of the Lutheran Church of Sweden, it sparked an intense debate both from within the church and from other churches. It was shown inside Uppsala Cathedral with the permission of the dean Tuulikki Koivunen Bylund, sanctioned by K. G. Hammar, the archbishop of Uppsala and head of the Church of Sweden. The opinion of Swedish society was deeply polarized, with some considering it to be a radical expression of Christian love while others considered it to be sacrilegious. According to Hammar, "We had two piles of letters, they were about the same size all of the time."
Some LGBT members of the church described the showing and defend the exhibition as the first time they felt at home in the church and embraced by it. Other LGBT members felt the erotic pictures perpetuated stereotypes about their community, or felt more alienated from the church after the vitriolic debate that followed the exhibition. Tord Harlin, the bishop of Uppsala, described the exhibition as "At best it is bad theology, at worst it is blasphemy." Reflecting upon the exhibition in an interview in 2004, K. G. Hammar said:
"Yes I found the picture difficult at a personal level, but that wasn't the issue. This was about homosexuals, a group who have a hard time to feel at home in the church. Should pictures which in a very charged way illustrated their part in Jesus be removed just because we found them difficult on a personal level? Then we would have sent the signal that the church and the homosexuals are two different worlds which are not to be mixed."
The photo considered most controversial was the one portraying the baptism of Jesus, in which the penis of the Jesus character was visible.
As a result of archbishop K. G. Hammar's sanction and defense of the exhibition, the Pope cancelled the planned audience he previously had granted Hammar.
Read more about this topic: Ecce Homo (exhibition)
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