Where are the Catholics? Not in TV advertising

The flip side of that coin would be to watch a lot of TV and look for Catholic characters and characterizations in TV advertising. But you would probably have to sacrifice a lot of time sitting through a lot of TV before you saw an actor in an ad portraying a Catholic.

Thirty years ago, Brother Dominic won the hearts of the viewing public when a Xerox copier made his work making copies of sacred texts so much easier. "It's a miracle!" he uttered, looking heavenward. Brother Dominic proved to be so popular he appeared in print and other TV ads for Xerox.

About 25 years ago, TV audiences got to see Cathy O'Reilly portray the seen-but-not-heard, bicycle-riding "Blue Nun" in ads for the German wine. She was eventually replaced by the husband and wife comedy team of Stiller and Meara, who proved to be more popular -- at least until Blue Nun and wines like it drifted out of favor with the wine-drinking public.

Since then, seeing a Catholic portrayal in a TV ad has been so rare as to be almost nonexistent.

Catholic criticism of a recent print ad in a Boston magazine for a fitness club featuring women dressed as nuns sketching a nude man prompted the idea to hunt for Catholic images in advertising.

A Google search for Web pages containing the phrases "Catholic images in ads," "Catholic characters in ads" and "Catholic characterizations in ads" -- even "Catholics in ads" -- turned up nothing. By switching "ads" to "advertising" in all of those phrases, the search results still showed nothing; unless some Web site posts this article, those phrases will remain out of the Google-sphere. Even the ultra-generic phrase "Catholic images on TV" turned up just one result -- a three-year-old blog entry posted after Pope John Paul II's death.

If you widen the circle to embrace another monotheistic religion, you'll occasionally see a TV ad with an illuminated sky serving as the punch line for Hebrew National kosher hot dogs, which "answer to a higher authority."

Regis Philbin or Ed McMahon or other Catholics pitching products don't count because, while they may be Catholic, it's not their Catholicism or any aspect of their faith that's being used to sell a product or service.

Public service ads sponsored by the U.S. bishops' Catholic Communication Campaign don't really count, either, since it's the Catholic faith or some aspect of it -- the current "For Your Marriage" campaign, for example, touts strong, healthy marriages -- that's being promoted.

Despite the use of the same medium, faith is different from toothpaste. And the CCC ads have to compete against every other religious and nonprofit agency for the one-half of 1 percent of airtime allotted by TV stations for public service announcements -- more than half of which appear after the late local news.

So what accounts for the virtual exclusion of Catholic images from the TV advertising world?

Advertisers want to sell their products to everybody. Despite predictions of its ultimate demise, TV is still the biggest mass-marketing tool around. And that mass market has to cater not only to Catholics but to the 78 percent of Americans who aren't Catholic.

To be truthful, there's no specifically Catholic way to clean your kitchen floor, or to get rid of pimples, or a Catholic car to drive your family from home to wherever and back again. You may see ads targeted to a Catholic base, but those are largely in Catholic newspapers and magazines, where you may be exhorted to buy a car from Joe Goodguy, a member of a Catholic parish.

Catholic television such as the Eternal Word Television Network and the various permutations of Faith & Values Media haven't accepted advertising for others' products.

It's safe to say, then, that ads showing moms who use Swiffer sweepers and dads who drive John Deere riding lawnmowers will be generically, safely areligious. And the same goes for every other product pitched on TV from here till -- eternity?

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Copyright (c) 2007 Catholic News Service/U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops