The Madonna of Orgasm Church (Orgasmens Madonnas kyrka) has suffered a disappointing reversal following a Swedish court ruling that the church’s name is unacceptable and offensive.

The church’s founder, artist Carlos Bebeacua has been fighting a lengthy legal battle in his bid to have the Madonna of Orgasm Church registered as a faith community in Sweden.

Founded by Bebeacua in the early 1990s, the Madonna of Orgasm Church is centered on a similarly named painting by Bebeacua which sparked protests during the 1992 World’s Fair in Seville, Spain.

The orgasm is God, the orgasm should be worshiped, Bebeacua once told the Kvällsposten newspaper. Bebeacua hoped that registering the Madonna of Orgasm Church as a faith community in Sweden would encourage more people to consider the orgasm as God.

In November 2008, he achieved an important victory when the county administrative court overruled Sweden’s Legal, Financial and Administrative Services Agency (Kammarkollegiet), which had refused to register the Madonna of Orgasm Church because its name was offensive. But Kammarkollegiet appealed the ruling to the Administrative Court of Appeal, which has just overturned the lower court’s decision.

According to the appeals court, the name of Bebeacua’s Madonna of Orgasm Church violates what is considered acceptable praxis and therefore can be denied registration as a faith community: In the opinion of the administrative court of appeal, the intention of such a combination of words, even in relation to the registration of a community for religious activities, must be to offend, not only for those within the wider circles of the general public who have Christian leanings, but also in society in general.

Sweden's highest court has refused to hear a last-ditch plea by the Madonna of the Orgasm (Orgasmens Madonnas kyrka) church to be recognized.

The church, in Lövestad in southern Sweden, has been fighting a lengthy battle to be registered as a faith community in Sweden, but Sweden's Supreme Administrative Court said there were no grounds to appeal a Court of Appeal decision to reject the application.

The church's Spanish founder and self-appointed cardinal, Carlos Bebeacua, has said that he believes that the orgasm is God and should be worshipped. Beceacua once told tabloid Kvällsposten: The orgasm is the ultimate feeling of lust, it shouldn't be limited to ejaculation. You can reach it through art or by looking at a landscape and thinking 'Wow!'

In November 2008, the Stockholm County Administrative Court overruled Sweden's Legal, Financial and Administrative Services Agency, which had refused Bebeacua's application to register his church as a religion.

The agency said the church's name would offend Christians, but the cardinal had argued successfully that local Christians in Lövestad, including the Church of Sweden parish priest, had welcomed the unconventional religion. He also pointed out that the word Madonna literally translates as my lady and does not necessarily refer to the Virgin Mary.

Bebeacua's success was short-lived, however. The Administrative Court of Appeal ruled that Madonna was generally understood as a reference to the Virgin Mary and that the name would cause offence not only in the broad groups of the population that have Christian roots, but also in society as a whole.

The Supreme Court said it would not hear the case as there were no serious errors in the appeal court's judgement and the case did not involve an important precedent.