Sweden’s highest court has refused to hear a last-ditch plea by the Madonna of the Orgasm church to be recognized. The church, in Lövestad in southern Sweden, has been fighting a lengthy battle to be registered as a faith community in Sweden, but Sweden’s Supreme Administrative Court (Regeringsrätten) said there were no grounds to appeal a Court of Appeal decision to reject the application.
The church’s Spanish founder and self-appointed cardinal, Carlos Bebeacua, has said that he believes that the orgasm is God and should be worshipped.
Beceacua once told tabloid Kvällsposten:
“The orgasm is the ultimate feeling of lust, it shouldn’t be limited to ejaculation. You can reach it through art or by looking at a landscape and thinking ‘Wow!’”
The Madonna of Orgasm Church is centered on a similarly named painting by Bebeacua which sparked protests during the 1992 World’s Fair in Seville, Spain.
In November 2008, the Stockholm County Administrative Court overruled Sweden’s Legal, Financial and Administrative Services Agency (Kammarkollegiet), which had refused Bebeacua’s application to register his church as a religion.
The agency said the church’s name would offend Christians, but the ‘cardinal’ had argued successfully that local Christians in Lövestad, including the Church of Sweden parish priest, had welcomed the unconventional religion. He also pointed out that the word ‘Madonna’ literally translates as ‘my lady’ and does not necessarily refer to the Virgin Mary.
Bebeacua’s success was short-lived, however. The Administrative Court of Appeal ruled that ‘Madonna’ was generally understood as a reference to the Virgin Mary and that the name would “cause offence not only in the broad groups of the population that have Christian roots, but also in society as a whole.”
The Supreme Court said it would not hear the case as there were no serious errors in the appeal court’s judgement and the case did not involve an important precedent.