Your Children Are Not Your Projects
some musings on Luce
Last October, the church released an image of a cartoon figure they’d dubbed the mascot of our 2025 Jubilee year, with the purpose of getting kids excited for the upcoming celebrations. Her name was Luce.
She’s a pilgrim: she wears a rain jacket, and has sturdy boots for walking. Her eyes are little shells. She holds a walking stick.
Luce, to be blunt, is not my taste. I don’t like Funko pop art; I don’t enjoy anime. I would have preferred a girl in a linen skirt skipping through a field of wildflowers with some woodland creatures around her. I would have brought in Lore Pemberton, or Chris Lewis. Her coat would have been a less jarring yellow.
But my kids? They loved Luce. They thought she was cute. My daughter wanted a doll of her. They asked if there were books about her. She gave us a way to explain what the Jubilee year was.
At the same time as this was going down in the Swinarski living room, the internet was on absolute fire over this illustration. Our kids deserve real beauty, someone barked. She’s not a Christian aesthetic, somebody else informed me. She’s childish, a someone else typed out, about a cartoon that is—this bears repeating—for children. The church is no longer capable of creating something beautiful, a Very Online Catholic bemoaned. While all of these people bit their fingernails and contemplated the fate of the church, my son asked if she had a Pokemon.
I laughed it off because, to be frank1, I have *actual* problems, but the whole debacle is related to something I’ve been mulling over the past year: that our kids are not our projects, and our power to form their tastes is much more limited than we admit.