Outrageous sacrilege against Catholics in the Rijksmuseum

The purchase of ‘Condom with erotic print’ – a 200-year-old condom with an image of a nun and three naked male clergymen about to engage in a sexual act – is a flagrant sacrilege. The Rijksmuseum has been exhibiting it since 3 June 2025.

This condom was a propaganda tool at a time when the Church was being brutally persecuted. Curators date the condom to around 1830. It probably comes from France. At that time, the Church had just emerged from 40 years of intense persecution as a result of the French Revolution. The clergy, depicted on the condom in extremely obscene poses, were beheaded with the guillotine or drowned in a river during those years. The condom was part of a propaganda campaign aimed at destroying the Church, in which hundreds of thousands of Catholics were violently murdered.

This goes far beyond moral and spiritual boundaries in more ways than one. This must stop immediately!

The sacrilege that is now taking place here is a grotesque insult to God, the Catholic Church and the entire Dutch nation.

We cannot tolerate this and it must be stopped.

We note with great dismay that the Rijksmuseum has crossed a line that is not only aesthetic or academic, but also moral. The decision to exhibit a historical ‘contraceptive’ in a parodic and religiously offensive context strikes at the very foundations of our civilisation.

The ultimate responsibility for this lies with the management of the Rijksmuseum, in particular with director Taco Dibbits. His explicit or implicit approval of this purchase and exhibition places the moral responsibility on his shoulders.

A cultural institution of this calibre cannot shirk the ethical consequences of its choices.

Stop the sacrilege! No blasphemous condoms in the Rijksmuseum!