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NEW YORK (Reuters) - A life-size sculpture of a naked Jesus made out of chocolate has angered a Roman Catholic organization and forced a Manhattan art gallery to reconsider exhibiting it during Easter week.
The sculpture "My Sweet Lord" by Cosimo Cavallaro was to be exhibited for two hours each day next week in a street-level window of the Roger Smith Lab Gallery in Midtown Manhattan. It was set to open on Monday, days before Good Friday when Christians mark the crucifixion of Jesus.
"We're considering our options," Matthew Semler, the gallery's artistic director, said on Friday. "We're still assessing the situation."
The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights called for a boycott of the accompanying Roger Smith Hotel, writing to 500 religious and secular organizations.
"This is an assault on Christians during Holy Week," said Kiera McCaffrey, director of communications for the league, which describes itself the largest U.S. Catholic civil rights group.
"They would never dare do something similar with a chocolate statue of the prophet Mohammad naked with his genitals exposed during Ramadan," she said.
Semler said the hotel had no knowledge of what the gallery planned to show and was being unfairly targeted. Moreover, he said the work was not irreverent.
"It's intended as a meditation on the Holy Week," Semler said of the sculpture, which depicts Jesus as if on the cross.
A photo of the piece on the artist's Web site (http://www.cosimocavallaro.com/) shows the work suspended in air.
The Catholic League has no intention of bringing legal action but seeks to punish the hotel with a boycott because "they're the ones bringing this into the mainstream, in the heart of Manhattan, for any child holding his mother's hand to see," McCaffrey said.
She was further irked by an unconfirmed report that Cavallaro invited the public to come take a bite out of the sculpture.
Semler said that was only a joke by the artist.
New York is familiar with peculiar clashes between art and religion. In 1999, then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani threatened to withdraw a grant from the Brooklyn Museum of Art for showing a painting depicting the Virgin Mary as a black woman splattered with elephant dung adorned with cut-outs from pornographic magazines.