A European Catholic student organisation has urged Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum to remove a “sacrilegious” condom from display while Dutch organisations have staged a demonstration outside the building calling for its removal.

The 200-year old condom features an erotic print of a nun and three naked clergymen about to engage in a sexual act and its display goes “far beyond moral and spiritual boundaries,” TFP Student Action says. The condom, dated to around 1830, probably comes from France.

TFP Student Action argues that the condom was a propaganda tool during the period when the Church was being persecuted.

“At that time, the Church had just emerged from 40 years of intense persecution as a result of the French Revolution,” the organisation says.  

“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.”

The Rijksmuseum, they say, 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.”

A second organisation, Dutch conservative Christian group Civitas Christiana, has been demonstrating outside the museum calling for the condom to be removed.

“It is a deep insult,” director Hugo Bos told AT5. “First of all to God, and then to all Catholics and the Catholic church.