More than Low Class? Claims that "Sacred" art in Catholic Churches is inspired by the Devil himself!

A new documentary, "Rape of the Soul", claims to

"explore the prevalent use of satanic, sexual, and occult and anti-Catholic images in historical and contemporary religious artwork. The film also discusses the acceptance of the artwork at the highest and most trusted levels of the Catholic Church...

..."Artists from DaVinci to Botticelli have imbedded subliminal images into their art for centuries, said Calace...In this case we found penises on crucifixes, anarchy symbols, swastikas, demonic faces and in modern works even the word 'sex' encrypted into the images."

This according to a story at World Net Daily. The website itself lack any specific facts that would make the reasonable person (ala me) believe them. The documentary appears to be from Silver Sword International, LLC, a company based out of Vancouver, Canada. A brief looksie doesn't show any links or connections to other organizations.

Before I continue this brief forray into investigative journalism please remember that World Net Daily had an editorial last year where they claimed,

“On Jan. 22, 1998, when [Pope Benedict XVI] was still a cardinal and the grand Inquisitor (yes!) of the Roman Catholic Church, he declared that their archives (4,500 large volumes) indicate a death toll of 25 million killed by the Catholic Church for being ‘heretics.’ And likely two-thirds of the original volumes are lost….”

Biases aside, the primary force behind the movie is Michael A. Calace (who claims to be Catholic, so we can exclude Jack Chick's influences from the production). He claims that while attending Mass at Holy Name of Jesus Church in Westchester, NY he noticed his children unusually drawn to the OCP missal during Mass. Using his visual art expertise he noticed phallic symbols, demonic imagery and the sign of the beast. Look for yourself!

Can You spot the "666"?

Unfortunately, I will have to remain unmoved with my belief that bad taste more than the desire to stir up hidden lustful desires is the case of most of our bad art. To paraphrase something Russel Kirk said, the Church threw away its centuries of beauty and began building (and decorating) it's buildings in the finest architectural traditions of McDonalds.