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.
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1 comment
Doctors and nurses and other emergency responders that offer themselves during these times are all heroes. Doctors and nurses and other emergency responders that offer themselves in the name of Christ, during these times, are both heroes and can also be saints. Believers and non-believers in such roles differ very little as they both complete their higher calling and purpose (logos), but only the Orthodox Christian faith in Jesus Christ can glorify any heroic human being and elevate them to the most highest purpose which is the pursuit of image and likeness of Christ God, thereby fulfilling God’s plan for His Creation. Heroes save lives but they can never defeat death. Saints can save lives but also defy death by death (the death of Jesus Christ).
The Romanian Church is wrong to condemn such images, but rather explain them. They should be promoting them saying, this is what anyone can be if they fulfill their higher purpose in life in the name of Christ God.