BishopAccountability.org
	Sexy Priest Push Too Secular for Some By Wade O'Leary and Emily O'Keefe ninemsn June 27, 2008 http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=587989 A calendar featuring Rome's sexiest priests has hit Australia, no doubt causing pious women across the land to pray for defrocking but disappointing some in the Catholic Church. Calendario Romano is into its sixth edition on the back of worldwide sales of 70,000 last year and can expect to do good business here on the back of World Youth Day. But local Catholics are strangely silent on the subject of the sexy celibates — WYD organisers refused to comment despite distributing the calendar and calls to the Sydney archdiocese were not returned. Melbourne-based Catholic priest and radio pundit Father Bob Maguire said the marketing strategy smacked of desperation. "There is no good way to market the Catholic Church so what they have done is gone the secular way, where you have got to have something attractive to the eyeballs," he told ninemsn. "You can't sell it just as it is because people won't take it, therefore you have to cover it in hundreds and thousands. "All advertising is an act of desperation and I guess this appeals to human nature, but I'm not sure that Australians will be taken in by the gloss. "If you really believe this calendar means the Catholic Church is attractive then you've been fooled: I think people are more interested in the substance." Given the background of the Catholic Church, Father Bob said he had reservations the calendar was heading in the wrong direction. "I am not particularly enamoured wit the sexualisation of the clergy, that is one of our lower natures that we can do without," he said. "It's a pitch that I wouldn't personally take, mainly because I don't look good myself — I never have." The calendar is not an official publication of the church: Italian historian and photographer Piero Pazzi first photographed priests as a compliment to the gondola calendar he also produces. "Most souvenirs have pictures of the Pope, but then I wanted to produce something less stuffy and more dynamic," he told wizzmagazine.com. And while he cheated and used models in the first edition, Pazzi insists all the dark-eyed hunks in subsequent calendars truly are men of the cloth. We're simply trying to catch people's attention with a priest's smile," he said. "Besides, if I'd used pictures of old men everyone would think the priesthood is archaic and dying and I want to demonstrate that (this) is a young and thriving profession." The calendar is so young and thriving that it has its own MySpace page, but the open nature of modern communications means Calendario Romano has made some rather unconventional "friends". And judging by the dozens of young women who have joined the leather man and the cross-dresser with the nun fetish in linking to the page, it appears fans of the calendar are truly a broad church.
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