How to Spell Universal

"All this is preposterous," boomed Academician Eugenic d'Ors. "We have to draw the line somewhere."

The 74-year-old patriarch of Spanish art critics limped scornfully out of Madrid's baroque Crystal Palace. What shocked him, and many another Spaniard, was an exhibit of religious art from Roman Catholic mission fields. Traditionalist Spaniards looked with anger upon the freedom with which the faraway artists had rendered scantily clad Virgins, Chinese Holy Families, Indian Gods squatting Buddha-like--all dominated by a huge statue of Christ dressed as a sannyasi (Hindu ascetic) renouncing this world.

Part of the work was shown at the Vatican itself last summer (TIME, Aug. 14) and caused no such furor. But in the three weeks since Academician d'Ors' exit, Madrid's art critics and Catholic intellectuals have loudly locked horns over the propriety, if not the morality, of the whole idea.

In his column in Madrid's Arriba, Critic d'Ors led off for the conservatives: "How can we conceive of Jesus disguised as a sannyasi floating on a lotus lily, symbolizing renunciation of the world He came to save?...or the Conception as an almond-eyed beauty scantily clad in a sari?...The Church universally is based on unity of language, prayer and iconography."

Jesuit Father Hernandez Heras, organizer of the exhibit, picked up d'Ors' idea of universalism and sailed it back. Could he accept "the Herculean forms of a prizefighter that Michelangelo gave God in the Sistine Chapel...the fat Flemish women Rubens painted as Virgins?" Heras, who teaches at St. Xavier's College, Bombay, thought some of the Indian types were "nearer to the Judean type of Jesus and the Holy Family than our classic figures."

Neutrals tried to calm down the dispute. Said a popular radio priest, Oblate Father Venancio Marcos: "It really is only an art question...Beauty in art is always near to God." The controversy blazed on just the same.

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