That's the implicit message in an edgy vocations poster that shows a Catholic priest wearing a long black cassock and trendy sunglasses -- a pose based on movie ads for The Matrix.
The poster was dreamed up by Rev. Jonathan Meyer, a 28-year-old priest who serves in youth ministries for the Archdiocese of Indianapolis in Indiana.
"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," Father Meyer said in an interview with the Catholic News Service.
Father Meyer believes pop culture can be a used as positive tool to promote the idea of the priest as hero. In The Matrix, Reeves' character Neo fights an evil empire controlled by artificial-intelligence machines.
"People love heroes. The poster personifies the priest as a hero," said Father Meyer. "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. Anyone who is a Matrix guru looks at the picture and automatically gets it."
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has sent 5,000 copies of the poster to Cologne, Germany, where they will be distributed next Monday among the thousands of young people attending World Youth Day.
In the poster, Father Meyer is holding a cross in one hand and a rosary in the other.
The poster itself carries a clever parody of the words familiar to everyone who watches rental videos: "This faith has not been modified from its original version. Yet, it is formatted to fit your life."
The poster's tagline reads, "The Catholic priesthood: The answer is out there ... and it's calling you." It is rated R, for "restricted to those radically in love with Jesus Christ."
Father Meyer said young men are drawn to heroic qualities, such as sacrifice, which are found in Hollywood movies including Spider-Man, Lord of The Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, and Star Wars: Attack of the Clones.
The Jedi knights in Star Wars are celibate, and in the first Spider-Man movie, Peter Parker does not have sex with M. J., his girlfriend, because it would put her in danger.
"More and more, we're realizing the presence of evil," he said. "We're talking about sin, we're talking about evil, we're talking about the powers of darkness.
"All these films are talking about sin and evil, too. What we're doing is taking a pop icon and using it for the good of the church."
But Rev. Bill Parent, former director of vocations for the Archdiocese of Washington, isn't convinced that the church will be well served by the poster.
"You see these kind of things periodically but I've never been a fan," he said yesterday. "It might get somebody's attention, but I think ultimately they don't do a very effective job of capturing what the priesthood is about.
"I do appreciate what it is trying to tie into, the romantic ideal of the priest as a hero, as one who combats evil -- I see that as a positive thing.
"But the question of vocation runs much deeper than any poster."
The Catholic church also borrowed from pop culture in the 1960s, when guitar-strumming priests wore their hair long and sang folk-rock protest anthems from the pulpit.
In 2002, news about sexual abuses by priests in Boston and other U.S. cities tarnished society's image of the priesthood. The number of Roman Catholic priests has steadily declined in Canada over the past three decades. In 2004. there were 8,641 priests in Canada, half the number of the late 1960s.
Father Meyer said the idea of him dressing up as Neo was jokingly suggested by a student in a meeting with the archdiocese's youth council last fall.
"It was one of those things where everyone laughs and then you move on to the next topic. Only after the meeting, I came back to this one."
With the help of a friend who is a graphic designer, Father Meyer quickly came up with the poster's design. It was given a trial run at in a Greenwood, Indiana church where Father Meyer serves as associate pastor.
It got a huge response, he said.
"They were going like hotcakes. Young kids wanted them to hang in their bedrooms, high school students wanted them to hang in their lockers."
Since last November, more than 1,800 posters have been distributed around the Indianapolis Archdiocese. An order of 100 was recently sent to California and 300 more were shipped to the Diocese of Madison, Wisconsin.
Bill Ryan, a spokesman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said the poster could help young men think about becoming a priest.
"The Holy See in various documents has always encouraged church communicators to make use of modern methods of communication, and I would think this would be a creative example of doing that, trying to use something popular like a film to reach out to various people who might be prompted to think about a vocation," he said.
"So I would say that we are very hopeful that this would have a good effect."
