Yeah, ex-Hitler Youths are scary.
Pope Palpatine has altered the sculpture. Pray he does not alter it again.
According to this , it represents Jesus rising from the crater of a nuke! :eek:
Just to add to Schnitte’s answer - about 10 years ago I was turned away from entering St. Peter’s Basilica (because I was wearing shorts in Rome in July) by two very polite, but very stern & humorless men. One of them raised his arm to point at something, and I saw a compact (semi-)automatic weapon strapped to his ribs. I thanked them and moved on.
And of course, in Dan Simmons Hyperion series, the Swiss Guard is the premier military organization in the galaxy, FWIW.
Some years back, National Geographic did an article on the Swiss Guard. They are comparable to US Secret Service agents who guard the President. The article showed photos of them training in martial arts in a gym that is part of their quarters at Vatican City. They are also quite skilled in the use of modern firearms and the plainclothes guards carry them.
The ceremonial guards with the halberds are comparable to guards in dress uniform that you might see in front of Buckingham Palace. They’re trained bodyguards who happen to be assigned to ceremonial duty. AFAIK, they don’t carry a gun, but they are dedicated men trained in unarmed combat and I’ve never seen a photo of one who looked the least bit out of shape. I daresay the ceremonial guards are capable of delivering a pretty effective beatdown without a gun.
Their ceremonial uniforms look silly to today’s eyes, but men dressed like that were justifiably feared mercenaries once upon a time. Their ceremonial uniforms look less silly to me than some I have seen.
I saw the thread title and instantly thought, “Cthulhu”. I was expecting the link to contain a pic of some rococo masterpiece. Little did I realise… :eek:
It really does look like a squid’s head on JC’s body, and the surrounds look like seaweed. It took some examining to see that that’s probably supposed to be hair blowing in the wind, not the head of a hideous submarine entity.
I came in here to post that. Catholicism is scary! :eek:
It needs a catchy name - you know - like Mummy Jesus (appearing in Chick tracts).
Anyone?
In the Cafe Society thread linked in Post #4 I called it “Cthulhu-Jesus Rising From The Sargassum”.
Sorry - post deleted. It was too horrible.
I can’t resist to add a bit of party trivia. The Swiss Guard makes the Vatican the most heavily armed state in the world, percentage-wise. According to Wiki, the Vatican has a population of 821, and the Swiss Guard comprises 134 men. This means that about 16 per cent of the state’s population is regular army - the U.S. would have to have about 48 million men under arms to match that.
In addition to the Swiss Guard, the Italian authorities also regularly police St Peter’s Square, based on a long-term understanding with the papal authorities. Which doesn’t mean that the Vatican won’t insist on its sovereignty if deemed necessary - when the commander of the Swiss Guard was murdered in 1998, Vatican authorities took care of the investigations themselves and politely declined Italian offers to assist.
It looks so underwater leviathany to me, I was certain it had to be some old scary sculpture of a pissed off Neptune/Poseidon appropriated by the Catholics and renamed Jesus. I mean, I could see sacrificing horses to a god that looked like that, couldn’t you?
(Can’t sleep! Cthulhu-Jesus Rising From The Sargassum will eat me!)
When I was there a couple of years ago, attending one of the Pope’s weekly addresses, I whispered to my boyfriend that it looked like they stuck the devil behind the Pope - a pretty good place to keep him, really. Like making the bad kid stand next to the teacher’s desk for the whole period. With Swiss Guards flanking him, where they can lunge at him with pointed sticks at the least sign of trouble.
I think it would make a dynamite prop for the next production of Wagner’s Hedge Of The Valkyries.
Isn’t this the exact kind of decor one would expect in the Ctholic Church?
It looks more like coral to me.
Coral made of hate.
A lot of the modern art in the Vatican is pretty iffy.
I thought of the princes stuck in the giant hedges of thorns that protected Sleeping Beauty’s castle.
But Cthulhucism is really scary.
Huh.
My first guess was that it was supposed to be God trying to bring order (the Universe) out of the chaos of the (pre-universe) void.