Sacred Heart Cathedral in Bendigo is scheduled to display a pagan exhibit featuring a Hindu deity for the next three months with Bishop Shane Mackinlay’s permission.
BENDIGO, Australia (LifeSiteNews) — An Australian cathedral will be hosting an obscene art exhibit that features a Hindu idol with the bishop’s approval beginning this week.
The “Transendence” exhibit, part of “The Wands” series of exhibits, features a Hindu deity with five “wands” and resembles a tarot card. With Bishop Shane Mackinlay’s permission, the exhibit is scheduled to be on display at Bendigo’s Sacred Heart Cathedral for the next three months.
The “Transcendence” exhibit is meant to “embody the tension between the earthly materiality and the spiritual," according to "The Wands" website.
"The idol is set out like a tarot card. The five wands tarot card. There are five wands in this thing. The cathedral is one of five and the idol itself is like the tarot card,” Family Life International Australia wrote in a Facebook post.
The First Commandment forbids the honoring of any “gods” other than the One Lord who has revealed Himself to His people, per the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
There are four other “Wands” exhibits in notable locations across the country, which the public is urged to visit as part of a “pilgrimage." One of these other exhibits called "Matter Becoming" is on display at St. John of God Catholic hospital in Bendigo and “challenges the visitor to embrace the tension of masculine and feminine energies," per "The Wands" site.
Sacred Heart Cathedral, the mother church of the Diocese of Sandhurst, is part of a cluster of three parishes. The main website for these parishes features a photo of a priest seemingly participating in a pagan ritual of the native Jaara people on church steps.
READ: Exorcists warn of rise in demonic activity following indigenous Pagan rituals
A petition urging the bishop to remove the "Transcendence" sculpture from the cathedral currently has over 700 signatures.
LifeSiteNews reached out to Sacred Heart Cathedral and directly to Bishop Mackinlay asking why they would permit an overtly pagan exhibit to be displayed in the church but did not receive a response as of publication time.
Appropriating pagan indigenous ceremonies for Catholic worship has become commonplace in Australia. In July 2022, Australia’s Plenary Council of Bishops featured a smoking ceremony at the opening Mass of its second assembly. In 2023, during his installation as the new bishop of Toowoomba, Bishop Kenneth Howell participated in a pagan “smudging” ritual intended to “purify” Howell and the cathedral of “negative energies.”
READ: Australian bishop welcomed to new diocese with pagan ‘smudging’ ritual
According to the Catechism, superstition is the deviation of religious feeling and of the practices this feeling imposes. It can even affect the worship we offer the true God, e.g., when one attributes an importance in some way magical to certain practices otherwise lawful or necessary. To attribute the efficacy of prayers or of sacramental signs to their mere external performance, apart from the interior dispositions that they demand, is to fall into superstition.
Contact information to respectfully voice objections:
Bishop Shane Mackinlay:
Phone: 03 5445 3600
Email: [email protected]
Bendigo Cathedral 03 5443 4400
