Mystery of the Missing Think Piece
The Young Pope, judging purely by its name and network (HBO), must be a soap opera – something like The Tudors or The Borgias; a debauched piece of palace intrigue written by and for the atheist alumni of America’s “Top 10 Liberal Arts Colleges.”
The show must, we hope, expose all manner of religious hypocrisy and misogyny, thereby meriting a lengthy analysis to be circulated widely on Facebook.
But if that’s the case, where are the think pieces by Emily Nussbaum, Jezebel, and Buzzfeed? Something’s amiss.
Just minutes into the first episode, the radio silence is accounted for: The Young Pope isn’t at all interested in being an allegory, a morality play, a lecture about “faith,” or even in making clear who the heroes and villains are.
We imagine critics itching to compare the palace intrigue of the Vatican with that of House of Cards, writing “The Young Pope is like House of Cards with much bolder colors,” then grabbing an early lunch.
But such a comparison would only work if there existed in House of Cards a distinct possibility that President Underwood was the anti-Christ…
…along with an equally good possibility he was, actually, Christ.
The story begins thus: The conclave has just elected a new Pope, a dark horse candidate put forward by Cardinal Voiello (Silvio Orlando), the Papal Secretary of State, as a way to keep the conservative candidate, Cardinal Spencer (James Cromwell – at his most bitter), from the throne of St Peter.
Voiello assumes this inexperienced new pope will be his puppet, but God wastes no time laughing at his plans. The young pope, an American orphan formerly known as Lenny Belardo, chooses the name Pius XIII.
The name Pius XIII was previously claimed by a schismatic and lapsed priest from Wisconsin called Lucian Pulvermacher. Calling himself Pope Pius XIII from 1998 to 2009, Pulvermacher led a group in Montana known as the True Catholic Church, which regarded every pope since Pius XII as a heretic and therefore ineligible to be Bishop of Rome.
As odd as that charge may sound to a non-Catholic, it is not unique to Pulvermacher and his “conclavists” (as such Catholic arch-traditionalists are known).
Since the Second Vatican Council (1962 to 1965) modernized the Church to allow for, among other things, less Latin, more democracy, and rapprochement with other Christian denominations, a reactionary current has fomented amongst Catholicism’s 1.2-billion adherents. The current seldom rises to the surface. Much as Americans who harbor doubts about the Civil Rights Act of 1964 tend to keep that opinion to themselves, those willing to openly profess skepticism of Vatican II are few and far between.
Even Lenny Belardo, now Pope Pius XIII, does not wholly renounce Vatican II. But his first few acts as pontiff are telling. These include the investigation and excommunication of all gays in the clergy, the refusal to commercialize his image on commemorative plates, the refusal to show his face to the faithful, and the reclamation of the papal tiara (a lavish, golden crown symbolically abandoned by Pope Paul VI at the outset of Vatican II).
But surely, this arch conservative Pope will turn out to be nothing more than a hypocrite? Not so fast, the filmmakers chide us. This young pope is not easily figured out – nor is anyone else for that matter. The further we advance into the first season, the more apparent it becomes that the narrative itself may be misleading us.
Is Voiello an agent of good – simply trying to restore the Church to its accessible and beneficent past self? Or is he, however unknowingly, locked in a struggle against the will of God himself?
Is Pius XIII an inexperienced, insecure pope of no real convictions? Is he Donald Trump? Or is he the new word made flesh?
Pius XIII himself is not so sure. In an early confession, he admits that he may not believe in God. Yet, he also performs a true miracle. And eventually we begin to wonder if Voiello was even the Machiavellian hand he professed to be during the conclave; perhaps it was a less human and more divine intervention that occurred. Can a god doubt his own existence?
It is as if the filmmakers know full well which way the HBO audience wants this one to turn out…and - Italian imps that they are - prefer to toy with us.
It is a series no American could have made – the product of two thousand years of Catholic theology, dogma, and ritual evolving alongside enlightenment, invention, and laicity. If the co-existence of the two seems impossible, it perhaps for that reason that The Young Pope comes across as absurd at times – with its characters who defy our expectations at every turn, its liberal scatterings of daydreams, nightmares, sexual overtones of persuasion and object unknown, and its filmmakers who seem enjoy the deep red, gold and whites of clerical pageantry just as much as Pius XIII does.
What are America’s TV critics to make of this mysterious psychodrama? It’s not entirely obvious, but we can’t help but respect the filmmakers for not making it easy. If nothing else, the lack of clickbait gumming up our Facebook newsfeeds is worth the ambiguity. The young pope would no doubt approve.