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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.Photography source: OrthoChristian
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