Wow what a stunning vocation campaign. I hope they got extra phone lines and increased internet bandwidth to deal with the increased traffic. In no time this aging order of habit-less nuns will be busting at the scenes with scores of vibrant young people. This ad in connection with their website devoid of religious iconography and mentions of Jesus, Mary, and the Saints will certainly help to get women to discern their religious vocation to follow God unreservedly. Plus if you join this order you can have hobbies and such – who knew? No doubt there are plenty of women thinking of devoting themselves wholly to Jesus and the only thing holding them back was the idea that they could not engage in a hobby like slacklining.
Or just maybe this poster is a fitting tombstone for this order.
Hat tip: Rich Leornard
27 comments
Hilarious! I guess something worth doing is worth doing poorly.
I do not think that I could agree with you more! I have seen this very ad in Vision vocation magazine and have pretty much passed it by for the very reasons you list! You can really tell quite a bit about an order by what and how they present themselves in ads.
As a young woman in the process of entering a religious order of habited pretty traditional sisters and being friends with other young women who are discerning I can say that the orders that have such bleh and misdirected ads tend to be the ones that DO NOT attract the lively faithful vocations they need.
I have actually been planning on writing a post about how one can tell the priorities of an order by their ads.
Thanks again for this post!
Horrible fail. (Oh wait, that’s vitriol, and it’s coarsening the debate and inciting violence.)
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Jeff Miller. Jeff Miller said: Worst vocations poster ever http://t.co/Q89BGR0 […]
Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.
I honestly thought it read “I love slacking” which really peaked my interest into reading the explanation. When I think of St. Benedict and ora et labora I find their motto of seek, pray, and share lacking. Maybe swap out share with serve. Judging by their poster I think too much ‘sharing’ has gotten in the way. I guess for myself ‘sharing’ invokes memories of the ‘this is what I think it means to me’ crowd.
I dunno, If you like walking a tightrope and are near the end of the line, then this order might be for you! you can even do yoga while slacklining, brilliant!
A Sister from this monastery came and spoke to our religious education classes last week, and she had a stirring testimony, but I agree with you in principle that such orders will continue to decline until they disappear or are reformed. To their credit, they do live and pray in common, and a few of them do still wear their habits.
In my poop stirring days, I’d blurt out without provocation “if it doesn’t wear a habit, it ain’t a nun.” These women don’t even want to be called nuns anymore. They’re Sisters. Okay. I wish them well. I hope they reform. Imagine me, a soldier, going to work every day bellowing it doesn’t matter if I wear my uniform or not, I’m still a soldier.
And I couldn’t resist ,… I bet those guys in the tug-0-war match are ticked. 🙂
Also, they really should fire their PR director.
She’s a nun? Or to be more accurate, a religious sister? I wouldn’t have guessed from her photo alone. In stark contrast to the Tertiary Capuchin sisters and two other congregations in our parish, who wear their habits 24/7.
I don’t think you were being entirely fair to the sisters. In the picture were they were playing the guitars, there was a crucifix hanging on the wall. An in the picture of the old sisters together, there were a bunch of priests and seminarians on whom they turn their backs.
This ad is geared at the Baby Boom generation. It is not geared toward young people. The Baby Boomers like to be cool, they like to do things by themselves, and they like to look “different.” Young people today are communal, they like to look like they are part of something (uniforms, special outfits, etc.) and they like to be part of a mission. Basic PR info.
I imagine the sisters are all about the age of the sister in the photo, and so thought the ad campaign was a great idea.
They need the young and healthy recruits to support the aging – sadly the ones they need are attracted to orders that know what the evangelical counsels are and follow them.
Initially I thought this was another one of your parodies.
I have to go back and check what the differences are but nuns and religious sisters are not the same thing.
This post really put my brain cell gear in motion and so much that I wanted to say about “IT” but I’ll simply mention that a Good Heart should in time lead God’s Children to Glory and “IT” is also said that God does work in mysterious ways and leave “IT” at that but I will also include, Good Luck Sister and I’ve already asked God and His Angels to keep praying for you.
God Bless Peace
I have to go back and check what the differences are but nuns and religious sisters are not the same thing.
From my limited understanding, the primary difference is that nuns are cloistered, religious sisters not.
IIRC, the main difference between religious sisters and nuns (strictly speaking) is that nuns make solemn vows, normally live in a cloister, and are bound to recite the Office. In every way, nuns are female monks.
Religious sisters take simple vows, and are usually involved in apostolic works such as teaching, caring for the sick and elderly, assisting in parishes, and so forth.
Of course, Catholics in ordinary discussion often referred to women religious, of either variety, as “nuns’.
I remember at my old grade school called a religious sister a nun, and caught hell for it. So be careful out there.
Actually Gail (#13), this ad is not directed towards Boomers, but it is a lame Boomer attempt to be relevant to X’ers and maybe Millenials. Of course, if they have even attempted to read the signs of the times, they should know that it is the X’ers who (after lots of struggle and derision on part of their forebears) are putting the Latin Mass on the map after years of suffering through Glory & Praise and other “meaningful” experiences of “Sharing Church”. Of course, the Millenials are way beyond even that… they laugh hysterically and ask me (an X’er priest) if the seminary really was that bad ‘in the day’… then they get out their rosaries and pray a decade or two in reparation and get back to studying Aquinas or whatever it was that my frivolous interruption took them from.
Yeah, I am going to submit this one to the FAIL blog. How awful.
Ok, I get it. I misread it too. My bad. Still… ? Lame.
I once ran across and ad in a vocations magazine when I was in college. It was on a folded page and had a picture of Sisters in habits praying, and the words “Sometimes you feel like a nun.” Then you would unfold the flap and it had a picture of some woman mountain climbing and said, “Sometimes you don’t.”
This ad is in their league.
Wow – how lame can you get? Again, whenever the Church, or one of it’s people (leaders or followers) attempts to be “relevant”, they just end up looking silly.
Well, the picture didn’t make me think it was a vocation advert, and I thought she was talking about shellacking! So I’m reading along wondering what that has to do with anything. It was only till I got to the bottom that I realised what it was supposed to be.
I’m a Gen X and the communities that I respect are the traditional Catholic ones, like ICRSS. I go the EF Mass and use the older prayer books b/c I think they have more reverence, beauty, and thoughtful prayers. I’ve been several years reading the writings of Blessed John Henry Newman; what humbleness and brilliance is there!
So… this ad didn’t do much for me.
My friend and I in college used to flip through that Vocation magazine every year and double over in laughter and many of the poor poor ads.
I kinda liked the poster for priestly vocations I saw a year or so ago. It started out with this caption:
If you don’t answer the call…
Then a picture of a polyester-clad, middle-age social worker-looking female type. Then the caption:
…then SHE will.
A joke, of course…but then, kinda not.
Speaking of habit-less nuns, here’s the main page of the Grey Nuns (I assume, so called because of their grey habit, not the color of their hair…) – http://www.greynun.org/. In case the picture is no longer there, I think there’s something a bit… wrong about this image – http://www.greynun.org/sites/default/files/images/Peace2.jpg
No offense to Michelle…er Sr. Michelle…but this looks like an ad for a lesbian yoga class.