Cardinal forces VW to backtrack on posters

The Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, has taken on the men he called "the sons of advertising" with the fury of Christ overturning the money changers' tables.

"Do the temple merchants have the right to ridicule the images that have belonged to the Church since her foundation?" Cardinal Lustiger demanded in an opinion piece in Le Monde earlier this month.

The cardinal's rage was directed at Volkswagen France and the advertising agency, DDB-Needham France, which thought up the Fr 100 million (£11.9 million) campaign for the new Volkswagen Golf. On January 28th, 10,000 billboards went up around France with four images which, Cardinal Lustiger said, offended and deeply hurt Christians.

The French bishops were so angry that they filed a lawsuit with the Paris tribunal, demanding a total of Ffr 3.3 million (£393,000) in damages. The tribunal was to have ruled on the case in a hearing on February 25th.

In the eyes of the bishops, the most offensive poster was the one showing the Last Supper, in which Christ proclaimed: "My friends, rejoice, for a new Golf is born."

Another poster showed a man walking out of his house in a bathrobe, rubbish bags in his hands, with a euphoric smile. "As soon as he saw the new Golf, Francis was converted," the poster declared.

Cardinal Lustiger demanded of the advertisers: "What do you respect? Does money justify everything? Don't you think that in hurting us this way, you betray yourselves?

"Today the Christ of Holy Thursday for the new Volkswagen, and tomorrow, who for yoghurt or the new generation of portable telephones? The poor? The sick? The old?"

It was particularly galling, the cardinal said, that advertisers were counting on the offence caused by the campaign to amplify its impact.

By filing a lawsuit, the French bishops said they wanted to elicit a debate on the use of religious symbols for advertising. At least four films have provoked anger among French Catholics in the past. So too did the Benetton poster which showed a black-clad priest kissing a nun in a white habit. But this time, the bishops said, the debate was not about the Church's attitude towards sex, but the commercial misuse of its symbolic heritage.

The Catholic Church won the latest round in France's unending battle between the secular and holy. Volkswagen removed all of the offending posters, the car manufacturer and advertising agency made a large donation to the Secours Catholique charity, and the bishops dropped their legal case.

But the ink continues to flow.

"Don't tell the archbishop I work in advertising," says an opinion piece by Alain Cayzac, the head of the French advertisers' association in today's Le Monde. "Business is not shameful, monsignor," Mr Cayzac writes.

An opinion poll yesterday put the French left-wing coalition at 43 per cent, ahead of conservative opposition parties at 32 per cent in voting intentions for regional elections next month. The far-right National Front received a 16 per cent rating.