A Mary with a
very different message
The poster shows her with a shocked look on her face
By Toni Fitzgerald
Jan 6, 2012
It's among the oldest tricks in advertising, and if done right it just naturally draws people's attention.
You take an image everyone is familiar with and add a twist, a visual gimmick usually, that creates an entirely different message.
People look, then look again, and often they laugh because they see the humor in the tricked-out image.
But not always. Sometimes, as in the case of a poster in New Zealand, the effect is to shock many and stir up controversy. In this case the controversy spread around the world.
It was a simple sign in front of a church. It showed the Virgin Mary as she often appears in religious posters, a shroud around her head.
But this Mary has one hand capped over her mouth, an expression of utter shock across her face. She's staring down at something in her hand.
It's a pregnancy test.
The poster was put up by St. Matthew's, an Anglican church in Auckland, last month.
What was the point? To get folks of all faiths to ponder the deeper meaning of the story of Mary, and there was no better time than Christmas.
"Although the make-believe of Christmas is enjoyable, with tinsel, Santa, reindeer and carols, there are also some realities," the vicar of the church, Rev. Glynn Cardy, told Britain's Telegraph.
"Mary was unmarried, young and poor. She was certainly not the first woman in this situation or the last."
That explanation did little to quell the uproar.
In the surge of new stories that followed, many commentators and organizations condemned the church. The local Catholic diocese criticized St. Matthew's for making light of the gospel's account of Mary's pregnancy.
But the overall effect was to get people pondering and talking about the image, and that was the whole point.
In fact, the church invited people to its web site to discuss the poster. They asked them to speculate about what Mary was thinking.
Some of the entries were quite creative. "If I say I'm a virgin, mum and dad won't kill me," suggested one respondent.
This isn't the first time St. Matthew's has used a controversial image to reach out to potential churchgoers.
Its Christmas billboard two years ago pictured Mary and Joseph in bed above a caption that read, "Poor Joseph. God was a hard act to follow." It drew similar global outcry.
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