I HAVE THE POWER OF GOD AND ANIME ON MY SIDE!
ELECTION IS DUMB SYNOD IS DUMB THERE IS ONLY LUCE
“Now we all know how the majority and the media in this country view the Catholic church. They think of us as a passe, archaic institution. People find the Bible obtuse, even hokey. Now in an effort to disprove all that the church has appointed this year as a time of renewal, both of faith and of style. For example, the crucifix: while it has been a time honored symbol of our faith, Holy Mother Church has decided to retire this highly recognizable, yet wholly depressing image of our Lord crucified. Christ didn't come to Earth to give us the willies, he came to help us out. He was a booster. And it is with that take on our Lord in mind that we've come up with a new, more inspiring sigil.”
-George Cardinal Glick
I would never be so arrogant as to see a major event in Catholicism and assume “the world wants to hear my take on this”, not in a million years. G.O.T.H.S. is me goofing around on my keyboard to pass the time as the American church becomes increasingly fascist, and if the blog ended tomorrow, nobody would miss it in the slurry of other emails and Content shoved in their face. The closest I've ever come to witnessing an event that appeared tailor-made for my perspective was that time that Sabrina Carpenter shot a Weird Sexy Murder Music Video at a Catholic parish in Brooklyn. But that's it. Until now. When we got the Vatican tokidoki character.
Earlier this week, the Vatican did this:
You may be wondering “is this real?” and the answer is “yes”. You may be wondering “did they talk about this at the Synod?” and the answer is “I'm not sure they talked about anything at the Synod”. But yeah, 2025 is a global jubilee year for the church (I think we can all agree that the past 25 years since the last ordinary jubilee have been pretty good for the Catholic church!), and to celebrate, the Vatican commissioned Italian designer Simone Legno, who blended Italian design, Japanese kawaii culture, and American consumer bullshit to create the tokidoki brand, to create Luce, the adorable mascot of the jubilee. Luce is a pilgrim - she wears a raincoat and muddy boots to symbolize the long and difficult journey through life’s storms, and carries a traditional pilgrim’s staff. She also has diverse friends:
Reaction to Luce across the Catholic internet have been mixed. Some Catholics think it’s a neat way to reach out to young people. Some people think it’s a stupid waste of the church’s time. Some people think it’s adorable. Some people think it’s sacreligious. Catholic World Report wrote an article titled “Using a mascot misses and obscures the point of the Jubilee Year”, and also complained that the artist who designed Luce was “pro-Pride”. JD Flynn of The Pillar wrote a piece titled “I like Luce”, but I didn’t read it because it’s by JD Flynn, who’s an idiot. More conspiratorial thinkers online posited that this was a psyop by the Vatican to secretly get us to fall in love with a gay cartoon version of Greta Thunberg that’s also into the Novus Ordo:
With all of the takes and all of the noise on the internet, only one Catholic website - Catholicism’s only website, as our official slogan states - is brave enough to find the most important reactions to Luce from the most important corners of the internet: Tumblr and DeviantArt.
Look, I’m going to be up front with you: I am about to post every single piece of Luce fan art that I’ve found in the past three days (the same amount of time that Christ spent harrowing Hell!). Some of them will be upsetting. A couple of them will be sexy (not explicit, not with nudity, but definitely where Luce is made to look older and sexualized). I almost scrapped this piece, out of respect for all of you. This sentence, the one you’re reading right now, is the off-ramp, this is your chance to close this tab on your phone and forget I ever wrote this and emailed it to you. But folks, we knew this was coming. We all knew this was going to happen. We all know that this is how the world works: if you create “cartoon character with big eyes”, we will inevitably, and rapidly, arrive at “the cartoon character doing sexy stuff”. We all remember when Zootopia came out.
Luce just officially debuted at Lucca, a major comics and games convention in Italy, and oh hey there’s a furry pointing out the giant inflatable Luce that’s up right now as I’m writing this:
An auspicious start. Now, I knew that Tumblr, where I still maintain an account for some reason even though I’ve long since deleted my Twitter and Facebook accounts, would have very strong takes on Luce right away. When I say “strong takes”, I’m talking about the exact inverse of the conservative condemnation we’d see from Catholic World Report; I wanted to see people attacking Luce from the left, which I absolutely got from the website that famously once had a multi-day controversy over whether it was culturally insensitive to criticize someone for grave robbing. See, as adorable as Luce is, she is still a product of the Catholic church, and Tumblr was quick to point to the church’s history of missionary atrocities and hateful discrimination. That’s how you get art of Luce burning a gay person alive, or criticism of the color symbolism of her rosary - it was an unbelievable unforced error for the Vatican to use the “Fulton Sheen says Asian people are yellow” rosary in their art - or multiple instances of Luce being added into old paintings of missionaries being killed:
But, ultimately, Luce is cute. So there’s just a lot of art on Tumblr either noting how cute she is, or making her cuter:
And, of course, to bring back the old meme, she has the power of God and anime on her side:
Some fans have “clapped back” at the church (I think that’s the term? I don’t know, I’m 37) by turning Luce into a trans or nonbinary icon, which I think is great and also I don’t think the Vatican is very clear on whether Luce actually is a girl or not:
Others have made Luce fully their own, aesthetically and theologically. Someone made a Satanist Luce:
And someone, inexplicably, made a Mormon missionary Luce:
There are, of course, two different drawings noting her resemblance to Rei Ayanami of Neon Genesis Evangelion:
Or, perhaps, she resembles a different famous blue-haired Japanese character:
Someone put her in a picture with Orel from the legendary Adult Swim religious satire Moral Orel, although I can’t imagine Orel’s family would ever let him hang out with a Catholic:
Also, someone already painted a Warhammer figure of her:
Also she’s now a resident of Ponyville, and I’m assuming her Element of Harmony is self-sacrifice, and her Cutie Mark appears to be of the jubilee logo hahaha just kidding I don’t know what any of those are I’m not familiar with any of the lore of My Little Pony stop asking questions please:
Now she has a gun:
Now she has another, larger gun:
Now she’s…oh dear:
This is our first Sexy Luce. Please put a pin in that, it’s time to visit DeviantArt.
Now, “DeviantArt” is a scary-sounding name for a website, but it doesn’t mean all of the art there is weird or sexy, it just means it’s derived from existing characters or stories. It’s a community for artists to post work that is literally “deviant” in the sense that it’s “derivative”. Some of the fan art for Luce on DeviantArt is downright cute, like this one or this one:
Look, Jesus is even holding her in this one!
Plus you’ve got her as a paladin or her defeating the Balrog:
And then there are others that are less kawaii but still clearly are done in anime-style, like this one or this one:
Ok this one, this one is starting to get weird but I guess it’s not super weird:
But then there’s this one, which is…oh no! NO!
Unfortunately, there is more than one piece of sexy Luce fan art, which, again, is what inevitably happens whenever someone creates “a cartoon character with large eyes”. I don’t love the coomer-san dialogue here, especially since this image, on the search page, doesn’t sit too far away from this one:
Don’t be like “we saw that!” I’m doing research! I wasn't looking at it for gross reasons! This is for an informative essay that promises to enrich the life of the church! I just - ah! No! What!
AH! SHIT! Well at least nobody is like AI-drawing a photorealistic Luce with dope ass tiddies AH SHIT AH SHIT! GODDAMMIT WHY DOES SHE NEED DOPE ASS TIDDIES
This is the hardest sentence I've ever had to write, and I hate to be the one to tell you this, but: dudes is gonna goon to Luce (it's a hard sentence to write structurally).
We are a pilgrim church, a church out in the world, seeing all of the ugliness and all of the beauty and making our way forth with others as best we can. Now, the thing about that is, when you put a piece of art out into the world, particularly if it’s a kawaii cartoon character, this is what happens. The Vatican launched Luce not to brainwash us, but to be out in the world, to get noticed by young people, to say “we are here, we are with you, we want to be part of your life, part of your communities”, and hey, it’s working, because now you’re part of the Tumblr community, of the fandom community, of the My Little Pony community, of the DeviantArt community, whether you want to be or not, forever. In the sense of being out in the world and meeting people where they are, Luce is already a runaway success, just not in the way, perhaps, that the Dicastery for Evangelization originally envisioned. Congratulations to Luce, happy jubilee, now let’s all go pour bleach in our eyes.