The Catholic Church has unveiled a new cartoon mascot known as “Luce,” and the raincoat-clad anime girl has already made a splash online.
Luce has been embraced and denounced by the extremely online masses, and, inevitably, inspired a ridiculous amount of fan art, and memes.
Who Is Luce, The Vatican’s New Mascot?
Luce was designed as a kid-friendly mascot for the Catholic Church’s upcoming 2025 Jubliee Year, which is all about hope, forgiveness and holy pilgrimages.
Catholic and kid-friendly do not belong in the same sentence.
Luce means “light” in Italian; the anime girl is designed to appeal to the youth of today, who have grown up watching One Piece and Demon Slayer. The character is rendered in the “chibi” art style, meaning short, cutesy characters with big heads and stubby limbs.
Luce was designed by Simone Legno, the Italian pop artist behind the tokidoki brand, who takes inspiration from street graffiti and Japanese art.
Archbishop Rino Fisichella, the organizer for the jubilee, says the mascot was inspired by the Catholic Church’s desire “to live even within the pop culture so beloved by our youth.”
Luce also appears to be a pilgrim, which is why she wears a raincoat, muddy boots and walking staff, symbolizing her perseverance through a storm-ridden landscape.
Luce’s whole outfit is loaded with Catholic iconography and symbolism; she wears rosary beads around her neck, and her bright blue hair might be a reference to the Virgin Mary’s blue hair covering.
Luce also has scallop shells in her eyes, which are an iconic symbol of the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage, with the shell representing the way to the Cathedral.
Luce proved a pleasant surprise for anime-loving Catholics, instantly inspiring a deluge of fan art and positive commentary.
Many made comparisons to Rei, a blue-haired character from the legendary anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion. Others pointed out that Luce bears a striking resemblance to the “Morton Salt Girl,” the official mascot of Morton Salt.
It didn’t take long for artists to reimagine Luce in multiple different styles, and a variety of poses; the mascot even inspired Halloween costumes.
However, not everyone was impressed with the Church’s new anime girl; more traditional commentators saw the chibi mascot as an embarrassment, too modern and silly to represent their faith.
Some even compared the name of the anime character to the devil himself, Lucifer, but the supposed link was quickly debunked.
Okay this sounds like some shit my crank protestant theocratic fascist coworker would try to say smear the Catholics, like the fact that it’s an anime isn’t cringe enough as is.
Many commentators urged the traditionalists to lighten up, and made jokes about the cultural divide between Luce fans and haters.
Brightly colored cartoon characters are a fun, inoffensive way to appeal to the youth, and the Catholic Church could stand to shed its image as a dusty, archaic institution.
While Luce has been introduced online, the character is due to make her official debut at the Lucca Comics & Games convention in Lucca, Italy, in the first week of November.
Luce will also appear as the Vatican’s mascot at Expo 2025 in Osaka, Japan, where she will be used to promote the theme of “Beauty Brings Hope.”
(CW: Long text ahead written by me) Lucifer was never meant to be the “all-malevolent” entity, especially to Vatican.
For example: Exsultet, the Easter Proclamation, is a Latin proclamation which Protestant churches readily and superficially accused of being some “worshiping to devil” (they’re not wrong but they’re not correct as well, because “devil” is actually a really complex and multifaceted entity, it’s not necessarily “evilness”, it’s something really impossible to be comprehended through the myopic lens from a framework comprised of a single religion such as Christianity, requiring a syncretic lens to really begin to understand outside the dichotomies of “good and evil”):
The translation is as follows:
There is another “hymn” as well that I couldn’t find in Latin, stating something like “O Lucifer, who will never be defeated. Christ is your son who came back from hell, shed his peaceful light and is alive and reigns in the world without end”.
Both these “hymns” imply Lucifer as both The Son and The Father. A proof of this is in Revelations 22:16 (NJKV), where Jesus himself says: “I, Jesus, have sent My angel to testify to you these things in the churches. I am the Root and the Offspring of David, the Bright and Morning Star.”
Then, there’s Isaiah 14:12 (NJKV): “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!”. For this verse, the New Catholic BIble translates “Lucifer” to “Morning Star” because “Lucifer”, literally a Latin word for “Light bringer”, is also synonym for “Morning Star”.
It’s also worth noting that the very first God’s vocalization (Word) on creation were “Let there be light”. The starting verses “In the beginning, God created the heavens and earth, and the earth was formless and void…” seem like a “preface”, the creation starts on Genesis 1:3: “And God said: ‘Let there be light’…”, because here is where we see “God” himself “saying”, creating. His first creation was this: Light (one could scientifically say that it’s symbolically/religiously/spiritually describing the creation of the photons and the electromagnetic fields back at the early universe, after Big Bang, because “electromagnetic” and “photons” are newer, scientific terms (i.e. they didn’t existed when Genesis was written) that describe a phenomenon that includes the visible light a.k.a. “light”). Physically, what light needs? Light needs a “medium” (the fabric of spacetime, the electromagnetic field that permeates the cosmos) to propagate, a carrier, a… “light bringer”. A “Lucifer”. Lucifer is the very medium for light to propagate.
Even the biblical “Satan” isn’t really describing a spiritual entity, it’s literally the “deceiving” side of humans (compare to the Hobbe’s “Homo homini lupus est”: “Satan” is our very “wolf” side, as good-and-evil humans as we are).
I’m not Christian nor Catholic (I was Catholic in the past). Nowadays I’m more an esoteric, occult person myself, with syncretic views among several belief systems, including (not ironically) Luciferianism.