Luce 💓 The Anime Mascot Of The Catholic Church 2025

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Luce was designed as a kid-friendly mascot for the Catholic Church’s upcoming 2025 Jubilee Year, which is all about hope, forgiveness, and holy pilgrimages.

Archbishop Rino Fisichella, the organizer for the jubilee, says the mascot was inspired by the Catholic Church's desire "to live even within the pop culture so beloved by our youth."

Luce means “light” in Italian. The anime girl is designed to appeal to today's youth, who have grown up watching One Piece and D. Slayer. The character is rendered in the “chibi” art style, which means short, cutesy characters with big heads and stubby limbs.

Luce also appears to be a pilgrim, which is why she wears a raincoat, muddy boots, and a walking staff. These symbols symbolize her perseverance through a storm-ridden landscape.

Luce’s whole outfit is loaded with Catholic iconography and symbolism. She wears rosary beads around her neck, and her bright blue hair might refer to the Virgin Mary’s blue hair covering.

Luce also has scallop shells in her eyes, which are an iconic symbol of the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage, with the shell representing the way to the Cathedral.

Luce proved a pleasant surprise for anime-loving Catholics, instantly inspiring a deluge of fan art and positive commentary.

Luce was designed by Simone Legno, the Italian pop artist behind the Tokidoki brand, who takes inspiration from street graffiti and Japanese art.

Brightly colored cartoon characters are a fun, inoffensive way to appeal to the youth and the Catholic 

Luce will also appear as the Vatican’s mascot at Expo 2025 in Osaka, Japan, where she will be used to promote the theme of “Beauty Brings Hope.”

I hope you read it.

Luigi Mangione, 26, was arrested by local police at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s with a “hand-written” manifesto describing “ill-will toward corporate America,” false identification and a 9mm “ghost gun” potentially “made on a 3D printer,” New York Police Department Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny said.

Assassinations are despicable. I don’t care if the targets are politicians or mafia bosses. It’s the method I despise. For those who are old enough to remember the killing of Patrice Lumumba, then JFK, then Malcolm X, then MLK, then RFK, every assassination is (I hate this word) a trigger. Assassinations are destabilizing. The shooting of Archduke Franz Ferdinand set off the First World War. Targeted violence has always been a sign – an augury – that the social order is breaking down. I would have preferred to see Osama bin Laden brought to justice so that we might have understood his methods and motives. I know that trials can be rigged, corrupted, and biased, but so far the courtroom is the best place we have in which to decide between guilt and innocence – and to assign an appropriate punishment. Assassination is a death sentence without the benefit of a judge or jury.

All of which is to say that I was deeply horrified by the assassination of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, in cold blood, in broad daylight, in front of the Hilton hotel, in Manhattan.

As I write this, the gunman remains at large, but his motives were clearly written on the casings of the bullets he used: “deny” and “delay”. Many would argue that those are the two favorite activities, the go-to business practices, the bold-faced words in the scripts, that health insurance employees are instructed to follow. As a consequence, Thompson’s killing has set off a storm of conversations and internet postings about the deep wounds that the medical insurance industry has inflicted on Americans who made the mistake of trusting their carriers to provide adequate coverage.

It’s a pity that Thompson’s murder is being politicized – as the latest eruption of the left’s destructive rage or as the sign that a gun-lover is brandishing his muscle. Brian Thompson’s murder is a criminal response to a criminal situation. The only consolation – the only good that could come of it – would be if his death led to some serious soul-searching, to a concerted attempt to understand why an apparently affable CEO inspired such violence and hatred.

Deny. Delay. Everyone knows what those words signify in reference to medical insurance. Doctors and patients agree that our healthcare system is seriously broken. It hardly needs to be said that medicine, in the United States, reflects and further deepens our profound economic divide. Not long ago, my husband’s longtime doctor left his practice to join a medical concierge service that charges $60,000 per person per year. Soon after, I found myself in the waiting room of an upstate New York urgent care center, watching patients ask the receptionist if they could pay the $35 co-pay in $5 monthly installments.

The critique of the national health services in Canada and in Europe was always that one had to wait months for a medical appointment. But now, in this country, we have discovered that an appointment with a specialist might take months to arrange, and (depending on one’s insurance) will be anything but free, as it would be in countries with state-sponsored systems.

Long before Thompson’s killing, people had been talking about the loved ones who suffered and died because of an insurer’s refusal to pay the cost of a treatment or of long-term care. If the extremity and cruelty of these companies’ cost-cutting measures didn’t so often strip patients of their life savings and their homes, they might almost seem like a joke.

Recently, an insurance company in the north-east decided, and later (after a public outcry) rescinded its decision, to limit the hours of anesthesia for which a surgical patient could get reimbursed. Should the anesthesiologist, midway through a long surgery, turn off the hose and tell the patient to bite the bullet? Or should the patient be billed thousands of dollars for those last few hours? And before we blame the doctors for these high fees, let’s remember that the anesthesiologists are paying fortunes in malpractice insurance … to the companies that are being paid by both the doctor and the patient.

What’s puzzling is why people who have suffered so much because of the current system are so reluctant to try something else. What would be lost if we instituted healthcare for all? Our freedom? Our control? Our ability to choose? The bad news is all that is already gone. The only things that might be diminished would be the annual bonuses and stock options of the insurance company executives.

So let me be clear. I’m sad about Brian Thompson’s death. The mess we’re in wasn’t his fault. Our problems are so much larger than he was. He was an unlucky, visible symbol of everything that’s gone wrong with our healthcare system.

I’m sad about the rage and desperation that caused someone to write “deny” and “delay” on the bullets he aimed at Brian Thompson. But mostly what I’m sad about is the fact that we, as a society, are so willing to accept a status quo that dooms our neighbors to suffer and die without the medical care they need. The writer Lucy Sante has said that we are in the 33rd year of the Reagan administration – an observation that has never seemed more apt. More than three decades have passed since we were told that we were on our own, that the miseries of our neighbors were not our problem, and that we should continue to allow the industries that the unfortunate Brian Thompson represented to profit from our tragic, unrecoverable losses.

Francine Prose is a former president of the PEN American Center and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Heat batteries store

If you are in Zagreb, Croatia, and you drive along Ilica street from west to east, when you reach Črnomerec, on the left, on the facade of a building, you will notice a large sign that says “Ciglane Zagreb”. Production at the brickworks has long ceased, the company formally ceased to exist in 2011, and since then it has only been mentioned in stories about times gone by. Find out why I am writing this in the post below.

Thermal batteries could transform renewable energy storage and provide a cheaper, more scalable alternative to lithium-ion technology. We need heat to make everything from steel bars to ketchup packets. Today, a whopping 20% of global energy demand goes to producing heat used in industry, and most of that heat is generated by burning fossil fuels. To clean up the industry, many companies are working to supply that heat with thermal batteries.

Storing energy as heat isn’t a new idea—steelmakers have been capturing waste heat and using it to reduce fuel demand for nearly 200 years. Renewable energy sources like wind and solar have seen prices fall dramatically in the past decade. However, these power sources are inconsistent, and subject to daily and seasonal patterns. So with the rise in cheap renewable energy has come a parallel push to find ways to store it for applications that require a consistent power source. Heat batteries are a fundamentally new way of storing energy at a small fraction of the cost. 

Heat batteries store excess electricity as heat in materials like bricks or graphite, which can reach temperatures over 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The stored heat can then be released when needed, making thermal batteries ideal for powering the manufacturing of steel, cement, and chemicals. What a thermal battery does is allow you to soak up clean, inexpensive electrons from wind and solar, store them as heat and deliver that energy later to an industrial customer.

Rondo Energy, (not Ciglane Zagreb) which turns bricks into batteries, wins fresh funding.

Rondo Energy is one of the leaders in this space. The company built its first commercial heat battery in California’s Central Valley at Calgren Renewable Fuels. The system stores solar energy during the day and delivers high-temperature heat 24/7. A pound of brick stores more energy than a pound of lithium-ion battery, at less than 10% of the cost. By 2027, Rondo Energy plans to expand production to 90 gigawatt-hours annually, a scale that could cut 12 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year. That’s the equivalent of taking 4 million gas cars off the road, according to the company.

With industrial heat demand expected to continue growing this decade, there’s an urgent need to find cleaner options. Thermal batteries could be a key strategy for keeping factories running as efforts to cut their emissions warm up. Thermal energy storage could connect cheap but intermittent renewable electricity with heat-hungry industrial processes. These systems can transform electricity into heat and then, like typical batteries, store the energy and dispatch it as needed. Despite their promise, thermal batteries face hurdles, including high upfront investment and a lack of familiarity among industrial users. The biggest hurdle is educating the market that this technology is available.

PS. Možda na Grgasu ponovo započnemo kopati.