As objects of religious devotion and worship, few cultural icons anywhere can rival the roughly three dozen monumental statues of Jesus Christ built over nearly a century across the planet. Among the most prominent of these, “Christ the Redeemer,” has been affectionately described by devotees as “protection for the soul,” a “reflection of God’s light … the blessing of a community by an ever-present deity.”
Christ the Redeemer was built 90 years ago in Rio de Janeiro, an imposing, 125-foot marvel of religious devotion that is one of the Brazilian capital’s most recognizable landmarks. Standing atop a steep, rocky mountain overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, it is an emblem not just of Rio but the entire nation of Brazil, a literal and figurative guardian angel that “protects the urban environment, like a roof over your head,” in one person’s words.
Now, another colossal statue known as “Christ the Protector” promises to be even taller and more awe-inspiring. At 140 feet, it is 15 feet higher than Christ the Redeemer and has all the markings of religious piety associated with Christianity and the arts.
Christ the Protector is being built in Encantado, a rural town about 700 miles south of “Christ the Redeemer” in Rio. Both statues have horizontal, outstretched arms that make them look almost identical.
Unlike Christ the Redeemer, however, Christ the Protector will have an in-built elevator. Visitors will be able to ascend some 120 feet to a viewing deck where Christ’s heart would be. According to the Association of the Friends of Christ, a Brazilian community group that is coordinating the project, the statue appeals broadly to people across religions, serving as a symbol of “divine protection and blessings for all their desires and achievements.”
The $350,000 project in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil’s southernmost state, is scheduled to be completed by the end of 2021. The statue was conceived by Adroaldo Conzatti, a local politician who died of complications associated with COVID-19 in March.
Like the dozens of other statues built during the previous century and this one—most of them in Latin America but also in Europe, Africa and Asia—Christ the Protector is financed by individual and corporate donations.
It is the world’s third-tallest statue so far dedicated to Jesus Christ. The tallest is Jesus Buntu Burake in the Indonesian province of Sulawesi. Completed in 2015, it rises 172.4 feet from the pedestal. Christ the King in Swiebodzin, Poland, stands 172.2 feet, the statue’s mound included.
But those records may well be broken by a 253-foot statue of Jesus planned in Tamaulipas, Mexico, although the project has stalled.
The horizontal arms of the statues lend them a cruciform profile that symbolizes the central mark of the Christian faith—the cross. Because this shape does not represent Jesus on the cross, the statues can appeal both to evangelical Christians—who typically don’t pray before crucifixes—and Roman Catholics, who do.
“And even the nonreligious can find solace in a benevolent figure who expresses protection and welcoming,” as Charlotte Allen, author of the 1998 book The Human Christ: The Search for the Historical Jesus, observed in a recent article in The Wall Street Journal. On Easter 2020, during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, when doctors and nurses in cities around the world were risking their lives, working extended shifts to cope with overcrowded ICU and emergency rooms and no end in sight, in Rio, in a moving gesture recalling that Christ was a healer, “lights projected a physician’s white coat and stethoscope onto Christ the Redeemer.”
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