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Archbishop Fisichella, lead director of Jubilee 2025, chose not to launch Luce, the Vatican’s first-ever mascot, from the Vatican. Instead, he unveiled it at Lucca Comics & Games, an annual comic book convention in Lucca. Dedicated to comics, video games, animation, science fiction and fantasy novels, this is the largest comics festival in Italy, and the second largest in the world. A three-storey high inflatable Luce floated  over the exhibition space set aside for Luce and Friends.   Catholic media underplayed Fisichella’s move for good reason. Continue Reading
Luce: Mascot of Vatican Surrender to Pop Culture

Luce is the name of the official mascot/logo for Rome’s 2025 Jubilee. A kitschy cartoon pilgrim derived from the cult-of-cute in Japanese comic books and animation, it is the brainchild of the Dicastery for Evangelization. Artificially child-like, Luce signals Vatican surrender to the hegemony of Pop culture. Competing for ratings in an image-saturated culture—one that values spectacle over argument—Mother Church has to entertain the customers. She needs to lighten up, lift her hems a bit, and show a little ankle. That means renovating the Church’s traditional symbolic system. Continue Reading
Lady Columbia

Politics is outside the bailiwick of Studio Matters. Yet election of the once-and-future President Trump was so remarkable, so exhilarating in its implications, celebration is mandatory. There should be dancing in the streets. Fireworks, too . But all I have is words. Permit me, please, just a few of them. Just this once.    It was June, 2015, when Donald Trump came down the escalator in Trump Tower to announce his run for the presidency. I scoffed at the news. Continue Reading
Mass Migration: Slouching Toward Dissolution

Our betters tell us that mass migration is a moral imperative. “Love has no borders,” they croon. They use this facile sentimentality to bully us into assenting to the dissolution of shared culture and a collective identity. It is hard to muster courtesy toward the Better Sort who consciously conflate the word immigration with migration. The first is a legal process, in effect a contract between arrivals and the state. In current context, the second assents to illegal entry by the brute force of overwhelming numbers. Continue Reading
Ripperger, Exorcism, et al., Part 2

Catholic televangelism is not what it was when Fulton Sheen pioneered it. In the following clip from a 2023 segment of the Chris Stefanick Show, Ripperger appears authoritative, reasonable, and self-assured. It is the demeanor of a tenured prof holding forth in the faculty lounge. “Demons understand human psychology the same way St. Thomas does,” the prof intones. That ought to have been a howler. But no. Chris Stefanick is dazzled at Ripperger’s facile equivalence between Thomistic theology and “cutting edge psychology”—neither of which he demonstrates any acquaintance with. Continue Reading