The official anime girl of the Catholic Church is already taking on the power level meme matchups

Last week, the Vatican unveiled the official mascot of the Catholic Church’s 2025 anniversary year: an anime girl named Luce. Chief organizer of the anniversary, Archbishop Rino Fisichella, hopes the chibi Bible-thumping mascot will help the church penetrate the anime community and spread the good word among children with an affinity for the genre.

Unbeknownst to Fisichella, the Catholic Church created a biblically accurate anime character to help the community skyrocket to the top of the power rankings against the medium’s most powerful warriors.

Luce (pronounced “loo-chay”) was created by Italian tokidoki creator Simone Legno. Like her namesake (Italian for ‘light’), Luce is a calm little blue-haired girl with bright, piercing eyes; she wears a yellow raincoat, muddy galoshes and a staff. Most importantly, Luce wears her Jesus piece around her neck to let people know she’s rocking Christ.

Like any self-respecting anime character, she is accompanied by a diverse group of friends who have likely linked their assortment of visual motifs to the virtues of Catholicism. But they’re not Luce. People online have taken to portraying her, by the power of God and animationwho dominates the medium like a holy warrior.

Just be it X/Twitter or TikTokanime fans around the world have been hard at work coming up with memes and fan art of Luce depicting the Holy Child – meant to symbolize weathering the storms life hands out to God’s children – as a storm to be reckoned with. In the short time that Luce has existed in the anime zeitgeist, she has quickly become one of the most powerful anime characters of all time. It turns out it’s not mud on her boots; that is the blood of her opponents after her tri-beam shoots them and absolves them of their sins.

In tribute to anime’s new benevolent overlord, here’s a short list of some of our favorite Luce posts.

It’s hard to argue with the unholy alchemy of the Vatican, which concocts their anime girl Luce as catnip for the anime community, and spreads her tiny image as an artistic template like loaves and fishes across the internet. However, it is still too early to tell whether the Catholic Church’s efforts to appeal to an even wider audience will produce a new generation of believers who will point to it as their entry point to salvation, as so many anime fans have done before . Goku van Dragon Ball Z. Seen how blue haired girls have the best luck in animeshe still has a long way to go before she can stand shoulder to shoulder with titans like the VeggieTales.

Update 5:40 PM ET: This article has been updated to clarify that Luce is not an artificially generated mascot, but simply an original design from the Vatican. We regret the error.

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