Your Turn: Laying It Down For Christ, New Heroes

With the Pope currently doing the rounds, the NYT has a piece this AM about a new Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York recruiting effort encouraging men to join the priesthood.  This image comes from a slideshow featuring six posters for the campaign. 

Besides the tag line "The World Needs Heroes," posters #1 and #5 seem to be borrowing from 9/11, and the support and mentoring role priests played throughout the crisis.  Poster #2 is more abstract and symbolic.  It's a black-and-white image of priests stepping into a gritty city crosswalk with words like "FATHER," "DESTINY," etc. added.  What attracted my eye was the black gash that severs the white horizontal painted lines, reflective, it seems, of how priests have crossed the line of purity and equality as a result of long term and widespread sex abuse.

The poster I was most interested in, however, was the one above.  I'm wondering how you read it, and whether you see any 9/11 tie-in here as well?

Calling New Priests: A selection of marketing posters from the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York to attract students to the priesthood. (NYT slide show)
Facing Decline, an Effort to Market the Priesthood (accompanying article - NYT)
wikipedia image: "Mychal Judge Pieta" + Judge wikipedia entry

(poster: Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York via nytimes.com)

Comments

[Some Guy]

I am not sure I do, actually. Calls to sacrifice are much older than 9-11, and I don't see what in the image specifically anchors in that moment as the basis for such a call.

[Mountainviewer]

Not 9/11, no. Reminds me more of the photos of Jonestown. Yikes.

Though the Jonestown bodies were more chaotic in their distribution on the ground.

But I suppose that's the idea. It triggers whatever images of collective self-sacrifice you have in your head. If those run in the direction of Christian theology, then I guess it will have the desired effect on you; and if they don't then you're not the target audience anyway.

But really, yikes.

[boxcar]

"You have to be a real man to be a priest".
Did you catch that one in the NYT slideshow?

Boy, oh, boy. Can't wait to see their new ad campaign for enlisting alter boys.

peace
box

[black dog barking]

I too thought Jonestown, Mountainviewer. And yikes, too. Sacremental wine instead of kool-aid.

Then — suicide bombers, recruitment of.

It's been a while since the RC Church has had any positive popular sentiment. Last I can recall is the fictional Father Karras.

[Puka]

This photo doesn't really evoke any 9/11 associations. There is an echo of Muslim prayers - the ornate (prayer) rug, the kneeling and bowing extended to full prostration.

[HelenaH]

The picture above just gives me the creeps. Same cult-like suicide imagery that others are picking up on. #6 was really interesting - "The priesthood is tough and it's for real men" - it defines and uses the concept of masculinity and reinforces the men-only closed world of the priesthood. Priesthood *is* hard work (my great uncle was a Catholic priest) but that poster lets you know that the Church still insists that such hard work is exclusively a masculine pursuit. It's not even subtext. It's text.

[Quaternion]

To me the image conveys total submission to hierarchy in a world that is totally male and composed of linearity and perpendiculars. No reference to completeness, totality, or femininity is allowed.

[PTate in MN]

At first, I saw a Muslim at prayer image. Now my eye keeps getting stuck on the priests at the back.

What I am most interested in is the ordination service framed by the slogan "the world needs heroes!" This is a muscular, right-wing authoritarian brand on Christianity. The image doesn't communicate 9/11 to me, but this toxic brew of heroes, sacrifice and religion does.

[boomer]

They're all imagining a child lying under them.

[Nell]

Creepy. I looked at the image for a bit before reading anything, and I thought for sure it was a Moon event.

[Megan]

Wow. A confusing image. My very first thought was an association with Muslin praying, but then a double take because that wasn't right either. Who knows where this bubbled up from, but my next thought was "What?? Knights Templar?"

So much red. The rows in the rug make this all seem to rush toward the viewer.

[Megalomania]

Moonies or Muslims, that’s funny.

Lying prostrate like that they are could very well symbolize the stead fast Christian believers that are murdered by radical Islam for what they believe in. Red, so symbolic, the blood, the sacrifice. The anti-Jihad is represented.

Maybe I’M way off but,

I think today George Bush went to the ultimate confession with the Pope himself.

The one and only who can give George hell.

[Cactus]

Overall, it seems that they are hitching onto the heroism of the first responders of 911, at least in two of them. Not sure WHAT no. 2 is all about, except a crosswalk. The last one seems to be appealing to masculinity, but I don't get the staging of the pictures. It seems to me that if you have to tie your religion to the heroes of 911 in order to have any gravitas, you've already lost the battle.

The poster selected by The Bag is truly bizarre. It's as if the appeal is to occultism. The prostration and the decoration of the carpeting brings to mind the prayers and prayer rugs of the Muslims. Having never been a Catholic, it just seems creepy to me. The only poster that seems to touch on what priests actually do is the one with the children. But then you are bringing to mind the sex abuse scandal once again.

What happened to depicting the things religious people do within a community? The one with children touches on that, but in context of the rest of them, it only serves to recall the scandal. What about playing basketball with teens in 'the hood?' Or officiating at a wedding? Or with parents at their daughter's Quinceañera?

I wonder if it's not that the church has lost it's position in the world and is just floundering, looking for a direction. As a result, it's all over the place. Was the exposing of the sex scandal really a belly-punch that knocked them down and they're still recovering? Did they put this collection together in a rush for the pope's visit? I don't know, but there just doesn't seem to be a solid religious message behind the collection. Maybe this is what happens to people when they are isolated and repeatedly told they are special. If the only thing you concentrate on, if that is your entire life, then the religion gets weird. That's what is depicted in half of those posters; the celibate, closeted life of men.

And I gotta say this, there is something about the poster above that recalled for me the film "Eyes Wide Shut."

[Mountainviewer]

I find it really interesting that for 6 of 13 respondents so far, one of the first images that came to mind was Muslim prayer (5 explicitly, 1 implicitly). This despite the fact that there is actually no moment in Muslim prayer in which one goes completely prone. The closest one gets is kneeling with forehead on the mat (see http://muslim-canada.org/prayerpostures.html). What does that say about the images that circulate in our subconscious about Muslim rituals, about the "submission" part of Islam, etc.? I'm not trying to imply anything about those commenting--far from it. Just wondering where that association comes from.

[Cactus]

Mountainviewer: I think it brings to mind the Muslim prayer posture in that something in our ever-connecting brain just clicks. It wasn't the prostration, nor the red-sashed white gowns they are wearing. For me, at least, it was that there was a mass of them all in the same prayer position (which one does not often see in Christianity outside the closeted establishments) and it was underlined by the strong pattern of the carpet. Perhaps we were also thinking of Hindus or some Tibetan monks/pilgrims.