“Just as Keanu Reeves fought against the powers of evil, a priest comes to help people fight against sin. There is a battle out there,” explained Father Jonathan Meyer, associate director of youth and young adult ministry for the Archdiocese of Indianapolis.
He made the comments in an interview with Catholic News Service about a new vocations recruitment poster being distributed by his archdiocese.
The poster, which is modeled after an advertisement for the movie “The Matrix,” is the brainchild of Father Meyer. It features a priest in full cassock — and the requisite Roman collar — holding a cross in one hand and a rosary in the other. And he is wearing sunglasses.
That simple juxtaposition provides the mood Father Meyer said he was aiming for when creating the poster — he wanted to say something about today’s seminarian.
“Today’s seminarian,” he said, “is engaged with the world but is also committed to orthodoxy, like (Pope) John Paul II.”
. . .
Father Meyer said it got a huge response. “They were going like hotcakes. Young kids wanted them to hang in their bedrooms, high school students wanted them to hang in their lockers,” he said. “That is invaluable. If we can get kids to hang a picture of a priest in their room, we’ve done something huge for vocations.”
The response, though, seems to make sense to him. It appeals to people at a level that everyone appears to share. “People love heroes. The poster personifies the priest as a hero,” he said.
. . .
And the poster was featured at a recent Indianapolis archdiocesan high school rally. At the rally, 500 posters were distributed during a “big tae kwon do number” performed to music from the movie, Father Meyer noted.