“We never burn anyone at the stake.” So reads one of the vocation advertisements published by the Claretian Missionaries in the Mars 1960 issue of Voice of St. Jude magazine.
In their effort to increase vocations at a time when computers—let alone social media—were unimaginable, the Claretians relied on newspapers and magazines as the primary means of publicizing the ministry and reaching more men who were considering religious life.
Through a virtual gallery featuring advertisements dating from the 1930s to the present, the Claretian Missionaries Archives USA-Canada is launching its second digital exhibit to share a glimpse of this fascinating medium. The exhibit illustrates the evolution of the ads and offers an introspective look at religious marketing through nearly a century of print advertising history.
For Doris Cardenas, Provincial Archivist, the most entertaining part of the collection is the ads published in the 1960s: “They were just revolutionary. They were very in-your-face—they were like, ‘Whoa!’”
This is the second digital exhibit published by our archives team. Cardenas explains that the idea came about after some people who had seen the ads began commenting on them over time, so they started by taking photos of the items they found.
“At first, we wondered: can we do it? And then it kind of took off from there,” she reflects. They were able to locate around 40 different ads, some of them dating back to the 1930s.
We invite you to visit this fantastic exhibition and see for yourself.
Note: If you’ve ever wondered what an archivist does, here’s Cárdenas’ explanation:
“Basically, an archive is like a repository responsible for safeguarding the collections of an organization, an institution, or an individual—whether they’re manuscripts, personal documents, photographs, negatives, slides, etc. An archive seeks to process and organize that material. Basically, we try to make sense of the material we’re given so that someone in the future can understand it.”
