These days my Sunday ritual includes attending a small, intimate, contemplatively-inflected evening Mass and then getting home in time to watch the HBO series The Young Pope, created by Paolo Sorrentino and starring Jude Law as the devastatingly beautiful Pope Pius XIII. He knows he’s gorgeous too. In one episode, when a Cardinal says that the new pope might be as handsome as Jesus, the pontiff responds that he’s probably handsomer. (No one ever mentions the theological principle that would necessitate the handsomeness of Jesus, but that’s for someone else’s speculation.) Jude Law is indeed lovely to look at, as is the whole show, with every scene so carefully composed you’d think that Rubens was on the production team.
And, whoa, is this show campy! With its full embrace of ostentation and excess, its sheer fun with every last detail from the Venus of Willendorf in the papal library (a statue that inhabits the Papal Secretary of State’s sexual fantasies) to the shimmering curial robes, it’s what Susan Sontag would have called high camp. When Pius XIII dons his full regalia—bejeweled shoes, golden robes, lavish rings, and a fabulous tiara—he does so to the backdrop of LMFAO’s “Sexy and I Know It.” I didn’t want the scene to end.
In short, the show is about pretty much everything wrong with the Catholic Church: the curial insularity and ambition, the secrecy, the feudal structure trying to survive in the 21st century, on and on. As leader of the church, Pius XIII is everything that Francis I is not. It’s not even clear that this pretty young pope believes in God, though he does believe in devotion to the church, by which I think he means devotion to himself. In his address to the Cardinals, he gives a mandate that amounts to a return to the days before Vatican II; I mean way before Vatican II—the Council of Trent might have been too liberal for his tastes. What he wants is fanatical devotion, which is what he thinks love is.
Part of the backstory is that Pius XIII, who used to be called Lenny, grew up in an orphanage, having been dropped there by his parents, revealed in a heart-wrenching flashback. When he is elected pope, Lenny takes along the nun who raised him (played with understated wit by Diane Keaton), to help him run the Vatican show. Pretty soon it becomes clear that what he craves for the church is compensation for his own inner emptiness, which no amount of human devotion can finally fill. So there’s another problem with the top-heavy church as it exists today; when men—and to the sorrow of many Catholics, it remains a matter of men—rise in the hierarchy, they take their fears and desires with them; and it seems that often enough the promptings of the Holy Spirit get distorted by the delicate egos of those at the top.
Jude Law’s Pius XIII is indeed a terrible pope. But I can’t take my eyes off him any more than I can stop watching every gorgeous scene. I can’t stop loving him even as I find him horrifying, which leads me to confront the complexity of my devotion to the church. It’s not that I even think it’s a superior religious tradition; rather, it’s the tradition that most speaks to me. It’s where I find my call to intimacy with the divine through contemplative prayer and the community’s sacramental life as we work for the coming of the kingdom of God, which largely means working for social justice with a preferential option for the poor in a deeply interconnected world—the vision that Pope Francis I ably articulates in his encyclical Laudato Si. At the same time, I try not to ignore the sheer ugliness that the church has perpetrated and continues in one way or another to enable. Further, there is also deeply associated with this tradition so much cultural, intellectual, and artistic achievement that I admire—never mind the papal tiara; consider Gregorian chant, St. Augustine’s Confessions, Dante’s Divine Comedy, the Sistine Chapel, and I suspect the list could go on until I run out of pixels. But how much do these cultural treasures have really to do with living the gospel? I suspect that the answer is rarely simple, singular, or fixed. A lot has to do with how we use them, how we relate to them. And as The Young Pope shows, it’s pretty easy to relate to them in idolatrous fashion.
This first run of the show has four more episodes to go, though I understand that it’s been renewed for a second season. I take this as reason for celebration. Perhaps in the midst of all the campy fun, Sorrentino, Law, Keaton, and company may yet disclose some intimations of hope.