Sunday Morning Scene, part Pars Duo: Please, stop.

Next year with be a Jubilee Year in the Catholic Church. For some reason, the Church felt it needed a mascot for this.

This is what it came up with:

How does a 2,000 year old institution in possession of much of the Western World's great art, come up with something so juvenile, and indeed something that looks like its out of Pokemon?

In announcing this, Archbishop Rino Fisichella stated that the cartoon imagine, titled "Luce" (light in Italian) was inspired by the Church's "to live even within the pop culture so beloved by our youth."  This presents the classic problem of the elderly, now the Baby Boomers, recalling the desires of "youth" in terms of when they were fairly youthful themselves.  Indeed, in my mind it brings to mind attending the "Teen Life Mass", or whatever it was called, that used to be held on Sunday evenings.  I generally tried to avoid it, but when I did, you'd find a guitar band with bongos for the music, lead by a Boomer, and a bunch of aged Boomers who would sway and whatnot to the music.  

In contrast, if you hit some Masses with a lot of young people, you'd find young women, some down in their teens, wearing mantillas.

I'm pretty convinced that in 2024, with ready access to the Internet, and all the news that's on it, combined with all the sewage that's washed up with it, such as horrific political arguments, the revival of racism, far right and far left extremist, Hamas murder and rape of young people in Israel, an aged geezer in the Kremlin trying to revive the Soviet Union, and young women prostituting themselves on TikTok, a childish cartoon from the 1980s isn't really going to win hearts and minds.  Indeed, its even worse than the Comic Sans Serif font and 1970s vintage art that was officially used for the Synod on Synodality.  And it gives emotional support to the Orthodox who are looking for reasons not to come back into the Church, even if superficially. This sure doesn't look like something Saints Cyril and Methodius would have passed out.

I've long held, and have stated it here, that Western culture had experienced Post World War Two materialism and found it lacking, and that the generations that have come up in the wake of the Baby Boomers are struggling to through the cultural innovations of the 1960s and 1970s off.  We don't believe that "Greed is good" or that the Sexual Revolution was freeing. The problem is that so much was destroyed that recovering is hard, particularly when the aged hand remains on the tiller.  Often that aged hand reaches out with what it thinks the young want, not grasping what that is, and actually making things worse.

This cartoon is really bad.  Somebody should look around the Vatican and see if something serious might be available.  The young Catholics in blue jeans, the mantilla girls, and myself, will all be thankful.

Postscript

I'm hating this image slightly less after some Twitter person made some interesting riffs off of it, but I still don't like it.