Author: Alex Schmidt

The LEGO crucifixion of Jesus Christ. What? Huh? Yes. No! Yes. Sorry. The LEGO crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

The Holy Mass: On Earth As It Is In Heaven teaches Catholic ideas with LEGO bricks. To do that, they re-enact every moment of Christ’s agony, with LEGOs. They pair a Mel Gibsonian fixation on Good Friday’s literal blow-by-blow with a tedious child’s fixation on staging minifigs. They don’t just put a LEGO Jesus on a LEGO Cross. They give Him His trademark unfair spear wound, straight from a LEGO-Legionnaire.

Is this choice of medium appropriate? No! Of course not! A tasteful Biblical artist doesn’t plunder their kid’s brick bin. Even the most penny-pinching Calvinist knows you gotta class up your God Stuff. Decent worshippers require decent basics: a crucifix in a nice hardwood, an altar-flanking pair of dove tapestries, one gross of the second-cheapest candles. Meanwhile, this book is by and for Catholics. Catholics spend. I promise Martin Luther failed to thesis-nail that out of us. In order to achieve Catholicism’s awe through finery, you must use one of the Trinity Of Fancy/Faith-y Art Supplies (oil paint, Carrara marble, Minecraft). This dopey LEGO book isn’t on that level. It fails to achieve Catholicism’s deluxe-trim sanctity. However, this book is the LEGO equivalent of Papal Splurge. It’s the highest-quality publication I’ve ever hotdogged. One copy cost me almost $40. That sum I rendered bought me a glossy 225 page hardcover graphic novel. Almost one thousand pictures of LEGOs. Its makers customized, hacked, and staged several Biblical epics worth of Danish petrole-toys. Unfortunately they photographed an unimaginable heap of LEGOs without learning to focus their camera. This LEGO Bible gets blurry. Still: there’s no lensing issue they can’t overwhelm with minifig crowd size.

This book is hard to summarize. Why? As far as I can tell, it’s written by gentle doofuses. Catholics with more wisdom or more cunning would’ve stuck to one premise. The Holy Mass: On Earth As It Is In Heaven has four premises:

1. Explain the elements of Catholic Mass.

2. Summarize the entire Christian Bible.

3. Recruit boys to become priests.

4. “Typology”

How would you do all that in one book? Also what’s “typology”? Patience, my dear Doggzchildren. All shall be revealed. Don’t make me construct a ruler out of LEGOs and slap your wrists with it, after also constructing a nun’s habit out of more LEGOs. LEGOs! What can’t they build? Their adaptability is the thrilling opposite of Catholicism. This book feels like the moment in a spicy novel when LEGOs and Catholicism consummate their enemies-to-lovers kiss.

Back to the book’s premise: yes, this book covers all four premises. They don’t do that well. Reading this book feels like running a marathon by running one hundred miles, in one hundred directions. It counts, but why? Are you some kind of sadist? Do you get off on pain? If you do, would you like to join the fake monastic order from The Da Vinci Code? If you answered “yes” please don’t hunt me. If you answered “yes” in Latin, you have to tell me.

Now: please truly notice those premises. The second one is a doozy. This book does it. They depict the entire story of the Christian Bible in LEGO figurines. That requires some, uh, choices in terms of bricks. Such as their “cover it? don’t cover it?” approach to The Beginning.

There’s also a focus on the entire Book Of Exodus. Probably because the actual LEGO company did an Egyptian set at some point, I assume? Either way, behold God’s blurriest Old Testament miracles.

We also discover the wonders of the Virgin Birth, and get a tasteful depiction of Mary’s pregnancy. I say “tasteful” because I assume there’s a creepy Sexual LEGOs fandom in some online pit or darkweb or subreddit. I refuse to check. I choose to be confident the opposite of Sex-LEGO-Reddit is “to depict ‘preggo’, glue an anodyne plastic dome on a boobless minifig’s frontals.”

These Bible tableaus see-saw between high effort and low effort when it comes to miracles. Here’s LEGO Pentecost:

It’s pretty alright yet pretty mid. They did Photoshop up that heavenly dove. But they hot-glued weird hot glue drops on the foreheads and called it “firewisdom”. Similar half-effort goes into the angels. One of them is the best panel in the book. They made a badass Archangel Michael swing a flaming sword at a LEGO Satan…

… another page presents another LEGO Satan ruling HELLEGOs. It’s all sincerely impressive…

…until you turn the page, and see the next angel. The angel who announces The Immaculate Conception is a winged cornball with slant bricks for legs.

This book also features what I can only describe as “LEGO Catholic Saint Baseball Cards.” Generating these seemed hard. It involved a lot of hacking LEGO Hair Bricks to look like baldness and tonsures.

Have you ever played “peekaboo” with a baby? I assume you get the same experience if you approached the authors with a minifig, take its Hair Brick off, and reveal its default baldness.

Overdue disclosure time: I grew up Catholic. Is that relatable to you? “And also with you?” Ha ha. That’s a li’l joke for us Former Catholic Kids. (The game show judges also would’ve accepted “And with your spirit?”) Due to my upbringing, I took a big interest in this book. I was also surprised to learn a few new pieces of saint lore. For example: Saint Francis Of Assisi (the one who likes animals) had so much of a connection to Jesus, he developed stigmata. I learned that from this book that presents Catholicism through LEGOs. Guess how they presented that stigmata?

Wow. No stigmata could be less respectful or more sanitized. Either go all the way and Photoshop some hands-gore, or yada-yada the grimness as aggressively as my Sunday School teachers did.

When “Gay and Gamboling Mo” posted this book on the Discord, I had questions. Why is there a book cover where LEGO Jesus dies for our sins? Is one of our sins the creation of LEGO bricks that will never biodegrade? Who published this book? Why were they able to grab “Holy Heroes dot com” before anybody else? Is it a sin to found a Catholic learning company that’s so profit-motivated, both its website and its parent organization don’t qualify for “.org” domain names? And how empowered am I to citizens-excommunicate “Gay And Gamboling Mo” from the Catholic Church? I don’t know if you Hotdoggin’ Youth Groupers know the latest slang, but I do, and one common street term for homosexuality is “Gamboling”.

After asking one real question and then wasting a lot of time, I ordered this book from HOLY HEROES DOT COM (a project of THE SOPHIA INSTITUTE DOT COM). Its back cover features the smallest load-bearing legal disclaimer I’ve ever seen.

Its contents offer greater nightmares. At least three elements of this book are weirder than crucifying LEGO Jesus or summoning LEGO Satan. For example: the introductory pages. This doesn’t need an intro. If you bother, make it faff. A basic “thanks be to God”, then on with the show. This book’s first pages ignore my too-late tips. They detour into priest obsession. They dedicate the book to priests…

…followed by a prayer that readers will decide to become priests…

…followed by a poem titled “The Beautiful Hands Of A Priest”.

“The Beautiful Hands Of A Priest”. What a phrase to print in Comic Book Font From Internet. Also how dare you, book. You shall not dogwalk me into a crass joke about The Bad Priests. How cut off from culture do these authors have to be to sit down, in this decade, and title their Catholic poem “The Beautiful Hands Of A Priest”? It’s 99% of the crass joke! Jokes about pedo-priests are like jokes about Nazis, or Bill Clinton. An overused premise about unpunished criminals. I thought the last “priests/altar boys” joke died off years ago, in the alley behind the dingiest ChuckleHut. Nope! Wrong! Turns out this book’s brickster dullards stumbled into a new joke, through the self-judo of turning the force of their earnestness against themselves. That’s the only way you title this “The Beautiful Hands Of A Priest.” I wish they’d re-title that title. The famed poet “Author Unknown” won’t stop you. I could think of a hundred alternative titles in the time it takes to ignore one homily. I could get a better line than “The Beautiful Hands Of A Priest” if I used CathGPT.

Speaking of creepy priest hands, this book spends way too much time with the star of its cover. “Father Joshua” isn’t your typical Catholic priest. He’s a LEGO minifig with a confusing “in midst of charley horse” peg-face. Or if you’re nasty, a “peg-face” peg-face.

Don’t worry: Father Joshua doesn’t do anything weird. Admittedly, he maintains that “Cenobite describing pain and pleasure” facial expression at all times. He also makes us watch him get dressed. That part has a purpose. F-J demonstrates the range of priestly vestment colors. Fun fact: those colors correspond to the Catholic calendar. Is this type of basic information about Catholic Mass included in the LEGO book about Catholic Mass? No it is not. Father Joshua does not go over that calendar element. Instead, Joshy Boy assigns a vague vibe to each vestment color. He does this in the tone of a middle school principal running the one annual assembly about Why Character Counts.

These vestments are also hilarious in the broader context of the book. Why? They’re delicate miniature clothing, made with enormous care… and that care did not extend to every other minifig’s outfit. Much like the Satan/Angel disparity, I cannot overstate how distracting the minifig outfits are in this book. Some of them are intricate textiles I couldn’t sew in a thousand years of trying. Others are whatever was painted on the standard LEGO sets these folks wasted. The funniest example is one of this book’s TWO COOL TEENS. I skipped this part of the format till now. TWO COOL TEENS are the connective tissue for every Biblical scene and priestly goon-grin in this book. The TEENS even invite you into the book from its cover.

Let’s take a closer look at the TEENS. “Cynthia” is an Irish-ish gal. Throughout all 225 pages of the book, men mansplain Mass to her. Is this evangelism? No. It’s more patronizing. The book specifically establishes that she’s been to Mass every week for a long time, and only got around to forming basic questions about it when a man helped.

The main mansplainer is our other TEEN. His name is “Fulton”. His character design is Han Solo Fred Durst.

You see it, right? Han Solo Fred Durst. The exact head of a LEGO Fred Durst, atop the body of this standard Han Solo minifig.

It’s like a cruel joke about the perfect celebrity for ten year old boys in 1998. When I opened this book, and saw “Fulton” on page one, I said “Han Solo” out loud to my cats. Then I wondered if that minifig’s chin-notch is the Durst goatee, or a Durstian jaw-dimple, or a third Durst Feature beyond my layman’s understanding. Any answer fits. You couldn’t customize a more Bizkit Brick.

I’m pleased to share a Fred Durst quote with you. He once lamented his red backwards ballcap as his “clown costume”, i.e. a social prison. To my delight, the LEGOTEENDURST escapes that prison, in the most upsetting way. Late in the book he removes his cap, because you can’t wear a hat in church. When “Fulton” takes his hat off, it should result in the common mortal struggle of matted-down hat hair, or the common LEGO Man head situation of “plain.” Instead, LEGBIZTEEN removes his cap to reveal an uncanny perfect LEGO Hair Piece. It feels like he replaced his hat with a Poxco Pocket Toupee™.

He’s even more Solo-ish now…but it’s sad? Also are you aware of the relationship between the LEGO brand and Star Wars? Twenty-odd years ago, Star Wars saved LEGO from a flirtation with bankruptcy. Now there are endless variations on Star Wars LEGOs. To the point that most of the interesting clothing options for LEGO minifigs are Star Wars characters. Especially if you want, say, a LEGO figure whose clothes-paint resembles interesting textiles and robes. This book accidentally turned most of The Greatest Story Ever Told into a sacrilegious Lucasfilm/Bible crossover event, because Jedi kind of wear monk/disciple/history shirts. “Luke Skywalker is a lot like Jesus if you think about it,” says the torso of this book’s Jesus. “And these blast points… too accurate for Sand People,” replies the chest of Thomas.

One of this book’s four premises remains. It’s called “typology”. “Typology” is both separate from Star Wars and the most Star Wars-coded idea a religion could offer. You might’ve assumed “typology” has something to do with fonts and typefaces. You also might’ve thought “typology” refers to any of the dozen-plus definitions of the word “typology”. You’d be wrong! Wrong, in twelve or more ways! You’re even dumber than the Sith Lord Cain, who slew the Jedi Padawan Abel with a red lightsaber or a Darth cubit or Noah’s Star Destroyer.

“Typology” is a profound Catholic concept, claims this book. “Typology” is the astounding revelation that the Old Testament of the Bible foreshadows the New Testament of the Bible. Surprise: the first half of the Bible relates to the second half of the Bible. I know what you’re thinking: “duh.” Or “yeah? probably?” Or, “I’ve been to a church service around Christmastime, and it featured the key Bible passages that relate to Jesus’s birth, because every church does that every year, so I’ve heard about the Old Testament prophet Isaiah predicting a Messiah will come, and the Messiah will be born to a virgin, and that prophecy was known way back in Isaiah’s time and Jewish people spread it around so that’s the plot reason the Three Wise Men in the New Testament bother to look for a Messiah. Every Christian on Earth knows the gist of this. Regardless of whether you believe in Christianity, that’s one of many simple ways the two halves of the Bible link up with each other.” Good job if you said that last thing.

Anyway: what is “typology”? “Typology” is a dumber and more pointless way of seeing parallels between the two testaments. Here are some examples. The examples are insights like “both Testaments involve blessings” and “both Testaments feature mountains” and “thorned plants existed.”

Kings! Kings plural! This proves the Catholic Bible is true, because the hearsay in the New Testament has symbolic relationships to the hearsay in the Old Testament, if you treat both sets of hearsay like those “match two pictures” flashcards for toddlers. Here’s another description of “typology”: two major cultural works, created decades apart, have matching easter eggs. Does that sound familiar? It might if you remember that notorious clip of George Lucas talking about the story beats in the Star Wars prequels. How is this LEGO Catholic book getting even Star Wars-ier? I need this book to stop throwing my mind in Sarlacc Pits. Or that lion’s den Daniel escaped. Which this book would probably depict with plastic tentacles.

Do these authors know they don’t need to reinvent the wheel? They can repeat other people’s Catholic ideas. That’s fine. That’s encouraged! For two thousand years, Catholics searched for meaning and wisdom in a shifting series of scriptures and papal bulls. Monks spent centuries becoming some of the only literate people on three continents, just to wring more value out of one sacred text. The makers of this LEGO book take that proud tradition, skim it maybe, and end up saying “it’s like poetry, sort of, they rhyme.” Then they turned most of the members of The Last Supper’s so-big-you-phone-ahead restaurant reservation into Obi-Wan Kenobis.

In my hotdoggery, I’ve discovered intentional evil. I’ve found malfeasance, and scammers, and a movie’s producers exploiting one Chinese actress in order to foist Versailles Pierce Brosnan on a billion moviegoers but then losing that audience and shelving their movie for a decade because the government of the PRC shamed the actress for alleged tax fraud and by extension a lack of patriotism. You know: the three kinds of bad things. This book is different. I’ve skipped its authors’ names and backgrounds because they seem fine. I think they 100% mean well and love (Catholic) God. The stumbles and shallowness and Obvious Jedi in this book feel like honest mistakes. The blunders of an outsider artist. A parodist could never.

That said: I wish these dinguses picked a lane. Do one thing well. Either explore deeper faith, or hack better LEGOs. Either google “Thomas Aquinas”, or branch out and make Star Trek minifigs like a normal weirdo. Nobody benefits from this clusterfaith of a book. Just like nobody benefits from HOLY HEROES DOT COM’s product lines of hacked LEGO sets, depicting boring Catholic situations.

Faith is a mystery. Capitalism is a machine. I’m just one little guy making the best of those powerful forces. So I can’t complain if any of this plastic garbage works for anybody. Whatever raises you up on eagle’s wings, amirite? All I know is this: no matter how skilled a writer they give it to, there will be a creepy, shrunk-the-kids, grope-your-blood-cells vibe to a franchise starring “Father Leopold: The World’s Smallest Priest.”

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Adrienne Hisbrook, a LEGO theologian trying to justify why the baptism set has sharks.