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(Basilica.ro) - Vasile Banescu, a spokesman for the Romanian Patriarchate, denounced billboards depicting doctors and nurses as “saints” with coronavirus-shaped halos as a blasphemous “visual mistreatment of Christian iconography” on Wednesday.
The posters, created by Romanian artist Wanda Hutira for the McCann Worldgroup ad agency’s “Thank you doctors” campaign and posted throughout Bucharest, have also offended the Medical Guild, Banescu said.
The scandalous images combine eclectic elements of Indian religious art and Orthodox iconography. In one image, a character wearing a robe, goggles, stethoscope, and mask, blesses with his right hand, as does Christ in Orthodox iconography, while holding a medical chart in his left. In another, a nurse is depicted with several hands, as in images of the god Shiva, the creator and destroy of the universe in Hindu mythology.
All the characters have halos in the shape of the coronavirus.
Banescu responded strongly: “I think this is a ridiculous campaign to promote a dystopian vision of the situation caused by the pandemic; an embarrassing attempt at symbolic theft and visual mistreatment of Christian iconography, marked by bad taste fed by ignorance and a hideous ideology that only knows how to caricature Christianity.”
The images are an affront to the hard-working doctors and nurses themselves, Banescu believes: “It is not just a blasphemous act but also an insult to the very honourable profession of doctors who, like all of us, do not think they are saints or improvised saviours and do not demand a public cult.”
Bucharest city hall said it would ask the advertising firm to remove the billboards, “which could be replaced with images that bring homage to hero doctors without offending the faith of passersby,” reports Reuters.
“[They’re] a daring artistic choice but one which is in no way following a political, religious or any other kind of purpose,” McCann Romania said in a statement.
“Doctors saved lives before Covid-19 and will save afterwards. Their skills outweigh those of using a stethoscope (they can do without and can do with more equipment). What doctors do for patients exceeds what is recorded in the observation sheet, including on a personal, human level,” resident doctor Adina Nenciu wrote on Facebook.
“But medicine and doctors also have limits. Beyond that, some (not all, I agree here) have recognized Jesus Christ, the Physician par excellence,” she added.
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For the "icon" like image I think its actually beautiful and Robert Lentz-ish. Not an icon but I like the message of seeing Christ in everyone and Christ as our Physician. Coronovirus as halo is a little off and the Shiva one kind of takes away from this.
ReplyDeleteSociety needs idols in lieu of saints
ReplyDeleteBlasphemy! Heresy! Crucify Him!!!
DeleteOh come on, you can do a better caricature than that, put some effort in ;)
DeleteI'm proof texting the Scripture and the Saints...I knew you would approve ;)
DeleteThere we go! Wouldn’t want to end up sounding like Protestant secularist leftists :D
DeleteI think this may be a bit of an overreaction. I'm more concerned with Putin and Stalin being glorified by the ROC in its new armed forces church temple. Now that is scandalous.
ReplyDeleteAmen, benefactors on the narthex is one thing, this glorification is another. Does know anyone know where the murals are located? Are these in the nave?
DeleteThat mosaic has evidently already been removed- https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/4335483
DeleteInteresting. Does not surprise me that this does not go over in Romanian, where kind of eastern "Christendom" still exists to some degree.
ReplyDeleteAnyone see that "Becoming Human" docu-drama-movie that the Antiochians have built a program around (all about "the nones")? Remember at the end where the director places poor west Louisvillian's into an uncompleted Orthodox icon? It is a powerful piece of movie making...yet, a certain type of believer would cry "blasphemy!!!"
From an Orthodox standpoint, it is hard to see how depicting someone with a halo is blasphemous. Historically, living people were sometimes depicted with haloes (for instance, the famous Ravenna mosaic of Emperor Justinian). And it is common that deceased holy people, not canonized, are painted with haloes. There are icons with haloes of Archbishop Dimitri at his cathedral in Dallas, and icons with haloes of Seraphim Rose at Platina. A halo does not officially mean "canonized saint". Only an inscription that says Saint so-and-so, blessed by an Orthodox bishop, has that official meaning.
ReplyDeleteAll this makes sense when we consider the story of Saint Seraphim of Sarov conversing with Motovilov. When St. Seraphim revealed his halo, Motovilov's was revealed as well. Because the fact is, we all have them. We are all created in the image of God, and saints are not ontologically different from the rest of us. The idea that one gets a halo upon becoming a saint reminds me of the American folk belief that people become angels when they die, and "get their wings" at the sound of a bell ringing.
The halo in the form of a virus is rather unsettling, but I can't help but think of the cross that is always depicted within Christ's halo in Orthodox icons. How did the instrument of his martyrdom become permanently imbedded into his halo? There is an actual visual and linguistic symbolic relationship between the coronavirus and the martyrs' crown that cannot be denied here.
To me the most problematic thing is the priestly blessing. Such a blessing is the work of priests, not of doctors. This is category confusion, and perhaps implies that the church will not help us now, only doctors. Maybe there is some unflattering grain of truth in that.
Whether there is something blasphemous about the multi-armed version, I do not know. A Hindu will have to answer that question.
Perhaps well-intentioned, but, still, just wrong. We honor our brave and good health care givers as they are, without stretching for inappropriate metaphors.
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