A Passion for Ice Cream

Last week, when we had our "In the Habit Party, I used an ad photo for the Photo Slideshow Board. Later I read more about it:

Antonio Federici is an ice cream manufacturer who sparked a storm of controversy in the last years. The religious themes featured in the advertising campaigns – where Catholic priests and nuns push for more intimacy than the Holy Spirit is comfortable with – got them banned several times by UK’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). 

“Ice cream is our religion” was the slogan of the print ad campaign and the first banned ads were “Kiss temptation” and “Submit to temptation”. The ads depict a priest getting intimate with a nun.

The 2010 print ad portrays a pregnant woman dressed as a nun who is enjoying her gelato italiano in a church. As the slogan states, the authentic Italian ice cream has been “Immaculately conceived”. ASA banned the advert because “it mocks the virgin birth of Jesus and the beliefs of Roman Catholics.”

The (Irish Catholic) creative director, on the other hand, said that it is a “challenging and iconoclastic piece of advertising. It tells a deeper story, the story of thousands of pregnant Irish women enslaved by the Catholic church in convents and who had their children taken away from them by nuns because they were seen as ‘moral degenerates‘”.

The advertising agency pushed the limits by launching another steamy ad showing two hot priests “‘in a seductive pose as if they were about to kiss passionately,”  ASA. “We Believe in Salivation” was the slogan of the controversial ad. All in all, who can resist the forbidden Italian temptations? 

 But ice cream seems to be somehow.........