Jubilee 2025: Luce, Tokidoki, & Brand Management

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.

 

Luce Inflatable At Lucca Comics 2024
Image uploaded to YouTube by @GreenErik14, the boy at the foot of the float.

Catholic media underplayed Fisichella’s move for good reason. The venue for Luce’s debut sent a clear message: “Hey, Zoomers! If you are shopping for a feel-good religion, the Vatican has one to sell.”

Naturally, Rome’s celebrants of eternal childhood did not phrase it that way. Zenit News crooned:

The cheerful pilgrim, Luce, symbolizes a journey through life’s storms, embodying resilience and hope—central to the Jubilee theme of “Hope Does Not Disappoint.” .  .  .  Luce is accompanied by three friends, each named to reflect core values of the jubilee. Together, Luce, Xin, and Sky .  .  . represent the diversity of the Church’s global message.

[The Chinese word xin can be translated as heart, the symbolic seat of emotion. Sky is for sky-gazing, an easier view than the Cross.]

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Motivational research: the new evangelism

Jubilee 2025 bears signs of a marketing gambit as much as, or more than, a religious event. The Vatican wants to boost its brand. And its PR flacks appear to have confused evangelism with merchandising, and penance—the soul of pilgrimage—with purchasing. Jubilee hype disfigures Catholicism with market-conscious boosterism and the nursery room cuteness of Luce. At the same time, it swells the cult status of Tokidoki, the Japanese-sounding life style brand co-founded by Italian designer Simone Legno.

Tokidoki is a merchandising machine with global reach. Luce is a Tokidoki-branded product. Ignore Vatican cant about this “bold new mascot” that “symbolizes a journey through life’s storms, embodying resilience and hope . . . .” Legno’s sly lavender cues can wait. Start with his business model. He built Tokidoki into a world-wide brand through a succession of megawatt partnerships that permit him to tap into the communications network and customer base of established brands. This facilitates promotion on social media and through such online marketplaces as e-Bay.

In effect, the Dicastery for Evangelization is piggy-backing on Tokidoki’s successful collaboration with high earning brand partners. These include Barbie, Levi’s for jeans, SkullCandy for headphones, a Mikasa LTD. Edition soccer ball (“a real kicker” via Fanboy), expensive collectible toys for BE@rbrick and more. In 2009, four years after Tokidoki was born, it was designing laptop covers for Jujitsu. It has partnered with Karl Lagerfield, T-Mobile, XBox, Sephora, Marvel, and the icky-cute Hello Kitty branded product line.

Read more at Campaign Asia’s overview of Tokidoki’s marketing genius. It illustrates why Jubilee 2025 is better understood as a road show for Tokidoki than what the Vatican glosses as “a bridge between faith and the digital age.” The Vatican’s embrace of Simone Legno is a windfall for the designer and his octopus enterprise. Conversely, it is a defeat for the dignity of the faith and the Church’s mission in the world. It infantilizes both laity and those churchmen who take cues from Vance Packard, not St. Paul.

 

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One of Sanrio’s Hello Kitty characters, originally designed for pre-teen girls.

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That feel-good religion . . .

Jubilee 2025 comes with an embarrassment of trademarked paraphernalia. You can browse some forty four commodities, each carrying the official Jubilee 2025 logo, via links on the USCCB website: “The Jubilee Holy Year 2025 Official Store Catalogue is now available for those looking to purchase items that feature the logo of the Jubilee.” The USCCB links to the catalogue PDF file and directs shoppers to the Jubilee sales office at sales@s4giubileo.com for inquiries.

Jubilee Logo

The catalogue features hoodies for $42; refrigerator magnet sets ($11); polo shirts ($27); key chain lights ($20, $17). Socket lights go for $14; A three-charm bracelet ($37) is already Sold Out. So is the metal bookmark ($16, with two design options). The inevitable Jubilee mug goes for $16. A baseball cap available in in two colors comes with either a Jubilee patch or an embroidered logo ($18).

Word is out that Gen Z seeks comfort from the strains of living by hugging stuffed animals. Dubbed plushies, they take the edge off adult stress. A compassionate Vatican obliges with with a polyester plush version of Luce ($48, $40), and a plush teddy bear ($23). For ten bucks less Zoomers can get a still-cuddly key chain version.

Click any item for an encouraging word. Teddy, for instance, is “a perfect item to remember the important religious event involving millions of faithful worldwide. Soft and charming, it’s suitable for both adults and children, who can hug it and keep it as a precious memento.”

Each pitch carries a Spotify Chat button: “Hi, message us with any question. We’re happy to help!” [Fisichella intends Luce to “speak to younger generations about the theme of hope.” But hope for what? And on what does hope reside? Ask Chat.]

Lots to buy but nothing to read

Since the Jubilee catalogue contains only Tokidoki-branded items, it offers no books. This would have been the perfect place to introduce a new generation of Catholics to Hilaire Belloc’s The Path to Rome (1902). A classic of travel literature, it was Belloc’s own favorite among all his writings. It chronicles his 750 mile hike from his birthplace in France to Rome. Calling it “a pilgrimage made in heaven,” Joseph Pearce wrote a luminous commentary in Crisis:

. . .  the reader sees Europe at the turn of a new century, over a century ago, through the eyes of a poet besotted with its beauty. We see it through the lens of a historian who understands the living majesty of Europe’s past. We see it through the faithful heart of a Catholic who beholds a vision of the Europe of the Faith in which the present is seen to be in vivid and vibrant communion with the past.

Rather than draw Gen Z into that communion, Fisichella’s Dicastery celebrates mass culture’s distance from it.

Luce: face of a user-friendly Catholic Church

Luce is scheduled to reign as the mascot at the Holy See’s pavilion at Expo 2025 in Osaka, Japan, from April to October 2025. Housed within Italy’s national pavilion, the Holy See’s structure will carry the theme “Beauty Brings Hope.” Luce will serve as the face of that theme.

What beauty? Can an aesthetic nullity occupy the same plane as a blasphemy? Leave the answer to Neil Postman. In Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), he wrote:

Christianity is a demanding and serious religion. When it is delivered as easy and amusing, it is another kind of religion altogether. . . . The spectacle we find in true religion has as its purpose enchantment, not entertainment. The distinction is critical. . . . Enchantment is the means through which we may gain access to sacredness. Entertainment is the means through which we distance ourselves from it.