At this point, you may have seen the Vatican’s recently unveiled mascot for the 2025 Jubilee Year. She’s a brightly colored anime figurine in a yellow rain jacket with sky blue hair and colored rosary beads around her neck. She looks like a kid’s toy and her name is Luce.
She’s been the object of so much controversy since the Vatican unveiled her earlier this week at a press conference that she’s just about eclipsed the fact that the Synod on Synodality is finally over (for now). The idea is that Luce will symbolize faith and hope (especially for young Catholics) during the coming year and that she will reach “new generations and [promote] intergenerational dialogue.”
— Become A Saint (@BeSaintly) October 28, 2024
To be perfectly fair to the bright-eyed bouncy anime mascot and her friends, a lot of thought clearly went into her design. The shells in her eyes are supposed to be reminiscent of the scallop shell used to denote pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago and the rosary around her neck is Fulton Sheen’s Mission Rosary.
If what inspires the modern world to pursue holiness is pop art and anime, that’s unfortunate, but so be it.
That all said, there are, of course, a variety of problems with Luce. The use of an anime-style mascot, indeed the use of a mascot at all, infantilizes religion — not to mention, it’s hardly the art we should expect from the Church that inspired Michelangelo and Rafael. Ignoring all that, the illustrator commissioned to do the work is widely known for his work on gay pride art and sex toys.
Catholic Vote reported that Simone Legno, the Italian illustrator the Vatican hired to design Luce, is also the artist behind the Tokidoki brand and his work has been connected “to gay pride events and a line of adult-themed sexual products.”
It’s not totally clear that Archbishop Rino Fisichella, the ecclesiastic in charge of organizing the Jubilee, was aware of Legno’s past work — Legno is a bit more famous for his collaborations with Marvel, Hello Kitty, and the Guggenheim Museum — but it seems like something Vatican officials would want to vet for. It’s not that artists engaged in Catholic art have to be saints (Caravaggio famously wasn’t), but perhaps we should consider the public work of an artist before hiring him to create a children’s toy.
Unfortunately, it seems that in the desire to engage in “the pop culture so beloved by our young people,” someone missed making a note of the more degenerate side of Legno’s career.
That leads us to the all-important questions being debated online: Should the Vatican even try to engage in pop culture? Is doing so out of touch with the generation of Catholics coming of age in this first quarter of the 21st century?
From one point of view, Catholic pop art isn’t all bad. Catholic art has the very difficult task of directing our minds and hearts towards the infinite source of all truth, goodness, and beauty — namely God — but ours is a faith of condescension. God condescended to become man, and it seems fair to expect our art could condescend to meet us where we are.
If what inspires the modern world to pursue holiness is pop art and anime, that’s unfortunate, but so be it. One hopes that eventually the modern Catholic would be increasingly drawn to the more beautiful and elegant art of his ancestors as his spiritual life matured. The thing is, however, it seems that young people are increasingly searching for a faith that’s different from the modern world of pop art and mascots they find themselves in. They don’t want to be sold on their faith, they want to be conquered and challenged by it.
That’s not to say that there won’t be young people attracted by Luce — even a curmudgeon has to admit she’s kinda cute — but it is to say that she may be more out of touch with the youth of this age than Vatican officials realize. By choosing to adopt a bright-eyed mascot to guide the faithful through the very serious business of a Jubilee Year (namely pursuing repentance, personal conversion, and greater personal sanctity), Catholics might just end up feeling like the Vatican is treating them like children who aren’t capable of anything more than a cartoon.
Besides her somewhat questionable author, that is really the problem with Luce. Arguably, what our society needs at this moment is not something encouraging it to continue with its childish ways, but rather something urging it to put aside the things of a child and take on the things of adulthood. That’s a task Luce doesn’t seem ready to take on.
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The post Let’s Talk About the Catholic Mascot, Luce appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.
