Posted on 15 June 2011, 6:44

A new titanic Jesus statue seems to be going up every year. Last November saw a local Catholic priest realize his dream to put up the world’s tallest Christ in Swiebodzin, Poland, and this year it’s the turn of the President of Peru, who has fast-tracked a gargantuan Saviour for the city of Lima.

The statue, which will face the Pacific, is to be unveiled this month, and will ‘bless Peru and protect Lima,’ according to the President.

There’s some confusion, though, about whether this will be the tallest Jesus of them all. Media reports say the Lima statue will be 37m tall, but that appears to include a 15m pedastal, which reduces our Lord himself to a mere 22m.

Excluding their pedastals, here’s how the world’s other giant Jesi stack up…

Christ the King, Swiebodzin: 36m
Cristo de la Concordia, Cochabamba: 34.2m
Christ the Redeemer, Rio de Janeiro: 30m
Christ Blessing, Manado: 30m

Hopefully more news soon on the thrilling question of who has the biggest Jesus of them all, a revelation which is possibly of more interest to male readers.

…whereas England is to be graced with a 50m-high statue of a horse. Which makes me think: Surely the next target for the religiomonumentalists has to be an equestrian statue of Our Lord (or possibly mounted on a donkey)?

Steve Tomkins emailed to remind me that Third Way magazine ran a diagram of huge statues last year, which included the late lamented Touchdown Jesus of Ohio (19m high), seen second from the left above, and Mark Wallinger’s Ecce Homo, which appeared on Trafalgar Square’s fourth plinth, standing at a lowly 2m, and seen fourth from the left above.

The vast Virgin on the right is the Monumento a la Virgen de la Paz, Trujillo, Venezuela, which stands at 46.7m.

Agree, Huw. Hastily-written media release: ‘Zacchaeus is a much overlooked biblical hero…’

Wouldn’t it be lovely to learn that someone had got their units of measurement wrong, a la Spinal Tap, and built a 37-centimetre Saviour?