A relatively young American catholic priest has ripped off borrowed heavily from the look of the Matrix to sell the sizzle of the priesthood.

Here's is the blessed advertisement with a sample Matrix box cover:

An excerpt from the Ottawa Citizen story carried in the Vancouver Sun (thanks Sarah!):

Just as [Matrix star] Keanu Reeves fought against the powers of evil, a priest comes to help people fight against sin. There is a battle out there," Meyer said in an interview with the Catholic News Service.

Meyer believes pop culture can be used as positive tool to promote the idea of the priest as hero. In The Matrix, Reeves's character Neo fights an evil empire controlled by artificial-intelligence machines. "People love heroes. The poster personifies the priest as a hero," said 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, 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."

Not that I want to rain on this particular parade for nasty reasons, but Neo also got to have sex with Carrie-Anne Moss in the movie.

How does the Catholic Church plan to deal with the absence of that particular earthly, physical reward for saving humankind? After all, they are aiming this poster at teenage boys.

Some other stuff from the article:

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."

The poster is clever and well-done, but from my perspective as an agnostic, it doesn't address the fact that the Catholic Church remains an immensely hidebound, conservative institution -- and that many of its traditions make it somewhat anachronistic in the modern world.

Allowing priests to marry and ordaining women would be two steps that would provide much more substantial results with regard to solving the priest shortage, but the church doesn't want to change.

Fine, then continue to wither in North America and Europe.

Wrapping a pre-medieval institution in the cloak of pop culture will do nothing to reverse that trend.