Romania’s powerful Orthodox Church on criticized an advertising campaign depicting doctors and nurses dealing with the coronavirus epidemic as saints with halos shaped like a virus.
According to a church’s official spokesman, the “blasphemous” campaign created by international advertising agency McCann Worldgroup in conjunction with local artist Wanda Hutira is “a visual abuse of Christian iconography.”
The campaign is “marked by bad taste fed by ignorance and a hideous ideology that only knows how to caricaturize Christianity,” said spokesman Vasile Banescu.
The posters, which appeared throughout Bucharest, the Romanian capital, were also offensive to doctors who “do not think of themselves as saints…and do not ask for public worship,” Banescu said, claiming that the campaign promotes “a dystopian vision of the situation caused by the pandemic.”
In response to the criticism, Bucharest city officials said they would ask the posters to be taken down.
The advertising campaign included posters at bus stops and train stations, as well as various public spaces throughout the city.
