22 February 2015

Papal stuff


Julia Terruso has an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer about commemorative crap:
More than one million people are expected to flood the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in September of 2015 to try to get even a speck-size glimpse of Pope Francis.
But there is an easier way: organizers are selling life-size cutouts of His Holiness.
For $120 (that's the twenty-five-percent-off price available through Saturday), you can own a "life-size standee" of Pope Francis.
The World Meeting of Families, the organization fund-raising and hosting a weeklong Catholic conference and the papal visit, is also selling tabletop papal cutouts for $15, an I heart Pope Francis t-shirt (with the heart substituted for a red mitre) for $14.25, and official Welcome Pope Francis posters for $9.
All that is available on the organization's website: http://wmof.myshopify.com/.
The Pope's visit to Philadelphia on 26 and 27 September 2015 caps a five-day visit to the United States, with stops in Washington, DC and New York City.
In Philadelphia, fund-raising efforts are well underway. The World Meeting said recently that it had raised thirty million of its forty-five million dollar fund-raising goal.
The merchandise scene will surely boom as the visit approaches. In Manila, where Pope Francis celebrated Ash Wednesday Mass this week, cutouts were placed around the city months ahead of his visit, according to local news reports. Local newspapers provided lists of websites and locations where people could purchase mementos.
Meg Kane, a spokeswoman working with the World Meeting of Families, did not know how many cutouts had already sold, but said a Philadelphia-area family, originally from the Philippines, came into the World Meeting of Families office to purchase a cutout.
The popular Pope has a wide array of tributes to him for sale on Amazon, including a Pope Francis baby onesie with his coat of arms, and Pope Francis soccer jerseys.
Another item for sale on the World Meeting of Families website is a fifteen-dollar Pope Francis quote mug with many of his sayings, including: "If money and material things become the center of our lives they seize us and make us slaves."
Rico says he won't be buying any of this stuff, and remind him to not go downtown the end of September...

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