When we started planning the conference on Catholic literary and media history in 2021, I agreed to speak about the series The Young Pope, which was first shown at the 73rd Venice Film Festival in 2016 under the direction of Italian director Paolo Sorrentino. Although I had seen the ten episodes of The Young Pope, as well as the ten episodes of the second season under the title The New Pope, I was sure that enough 'Catholic' themes could be isolated from the series' web of images and plots to make a fruitful contribution: what a productive media example The Young Pope is, a media example closely intertwined with the Church, with Vatican faith politics and with all kinds of Christian and non-Christian concerns.
However, as I realised when I returned to the series recently, I had ignored what a decidedly complex Catholic series The Young Pope is, since it is actually part of the structure of this series to address and respond to ecclesiastical concerns with the utmost visual sensitivity, closeness and Catholic awareness, but I had also ignored the fact that its intricacy, complexity and contradictions make it very difficult to make systematic considerations.
the same. Based on this situation and these findings, however, I would like to formulate an initial thesis: The complexity, the web of signs in The Young Pope, the decidedly dominant visuality are, among other things, characteristics that express the nature of the church, indeed paradigmatically describe the church in its paradox, in its contrasts and in its meaningfulness and obscuring of meaning. Just as the church itself is contradictory, The Young Pope is contradictory, fractured, dogmatic, anti-dogmatic, clear and ambiguous.
In the following, I will therefore present the main features of The Young Pope as an initial plea for further research in media culture studies on this prime example of Catholic media history in recent years, sorting out the focal points of the series and interpreting them within the conference title: The Young Pope is a return of religion to the popular and audience-appealing series format, but due to its sprawling subject matter, due to this dichotomy of a traditional vs. a modern/liberal church, it is forced to incessantly exaggerate its character structure, to shift contexts, to break initial successes of understanding again, to confuse and also to withdraw religious and thus moral unambiguities from a clear understanding again. The Young Pope is, and this is my second thesis, an action-packed and visually powerful expression of what I call Catholic feeling, not in order to immediately shake and provoke this Catholic feeling when it can come to itself and rest.
Lenny Belardo (Jude Law), the first American to sit on the throne of Peter, was elected pontiff at a time roughly corresponding to the present day and took the name Pius XIII. Belardo - in a peculiar and contradictory way, he is a traditionalist - thus explicitly refers to the pontificate of Pius X, the pope who is still a shining example of Catholic leadership for many Catholics close to the reaction. And sedevacantists explicitly refer to the valid popes between St Peter the First and St Pius the Last. The last Pius is now Pius XIII, an enigmatic and clearly sexualised smoker, who only drinks a Cherry Coke in the morning, whose valid election is not questioned by anyone, but who will impose all kinds of impositions on his sagging church.
A pope straight out of a picture book - episode one
The opening credits of the first episode have become a surreal start to the series. The new Pope wakes up after a sex dream and gives his first speech to the faithful on the famous loggia of St Peter's Basilica. It is pouring rain. What we see is a reformulation of the familiar images, the servant holding the Pope's microphone, the unrolled carpet with the papal coat of arms, the enthusiastic crowd in St Peter's Square. We have seen everything like this countless times before, conveyed by the media. This is where the Catholic feeling that I will be talking about begins. It is the Catholic spectacle that can be seen, by which one can be gripped and inspired or repelled, but it is the Catholic feeling that relates to the staging of the papal personality as the satisfaction of mass desires.
What is now said to the faithful in the Pope's first speech to the people has the potential to become a sensation and revolution according to the liberal standards of German church reporting in the usual quality media. Pope Pius XIII spreads out his arms, a gesture of greeting and reception of higher truths in equal measure, as the rain stops to the astonished murmur of the faithful, umbrellas are folded up and hoods are pulled back after the sun breaks through. A sign: The weather and light conditions also legitimise the Vicar of Christ on earth. Pius XIII proclaims all the things we have forgotten: the poor, the weak, homosexuals, abortionists. The cardinals are shocked and the faithful are not enthusiastic either, as they don't really know what to make of this new liberal wind.
Yet everything is different, and Lenny wakes up in his bed - as the newly elected pope, but without having shown himself to the faithful yet. A good example of the contradictory tipping point that all seemingly stable statements and ontologies quickly become in this series example, thereby confusing and chaoticising Catholic sentiment.
As the Pope, Lenny Belardo is quite the opposite of the "telegenic puppet" that the older cardinals think he is, because the exact opposite is true: "he [can] be manipulated. It was a masterpiece of Voiello's diplomatic finesse." Cardinal Voiello, who was supposedly pulling the strings because he had made Belardo pope in a skilful game, would soon have to realise that the pope was not following his ideas at all. "Contrary to the expectations of his stirrup holders, he does not prove to be a manipulable puppet in the Holy See, but a religious hardliner in the tradition of his namesakes as Bishop of Rome."
One shot shows him in front of the picture of Pope Pius X, in whose line of succession the pictures position him. He is characterised by all kinds of quirks and eccentricities. Instead of agreeing to a meeting with Voiello about the next plans, his expected speech and the direction of his pontificate, he waits on the helipad for the arrival of Sister Mary (Diane Keeton), in whose children's home Lenny grew up and by whom he was identified early on as a "saint". When Voiello realises that Sister Mary is to be given a special role for Pope Pius XIII, he is all fired up: "We could create a kind of special status for her. In such cases, we are not lacking in imagination."
He actually wants to present his ideas to the Pope for his speech to the College of Cardinals and possibly discuss initial ideas for an encyclical. He does not yet know that Pius XIII will appoint Sister Mary instead of Voiello. While the previous portrayals were recreations and/or caricatures of processes in the Papal States, we come closer to Catholic sentiment when The Young Pope also addresses the sacraments and functionalises them as a projection screen for recipients' memories. For example, the series provides insights into Belardo's first confession since becoming the new Pope, in which he confesses that he does not believe in God. This speech act is also clearly characterised by its ambivalence and fluctuating ontology: Pius XIII immediately relativises the subsequent horror of his confessor by saying that this had been a joke. Nevertheless, the Pope's doubts about God are often addressed, not least to show him as an intense praying man whose pleas are heard.
Philosophy for Catholics despite everything
After this summary of the first episode, we have now arrived at the subtitle of the lecture, which, with the term "Catholic Feeling", already indicates that The Young Pope is a challenge for this. The book that inspired the subtitle was written by the Italian philosopher Mario Perniola: Vom katholischen Fühlen. The cultural form of a universal religion.
The first part of the book is called: Why I cannot call myself anything other than "Catholic" and formulates in the first chapter A Catholicism without Orthodoxy a thought that is also decisive for The Young Pope: "Can one feel Catholic without believing in the sacramental character of marriage? Or feel Catholic without believing in the infallibility of the Pope? Or feel like a Catholic without believing in the divinity of Jesus Christ? These questions are nonsensical only so long as one presupposes from the outset an indissoluble relationship between Catholicism and assent to doctrines." (11)
He goes on to ask: "But can Catholicism per se be identified with what the Church says about itself? Is this conception not too meagre, not too limited for an immense cultural and spiritual heritage that goes back to the Middle Ages and is rooted in antiquity?" (11) Just as the universal imagery and motif language of The Young Pope could be described as universal, with its distinctly painting-like lighting and staggered figures, the series draws on a strongly archaic and ritual-affine background to life. Perniola states that he "tends to identify the essence of catholicity less in faith than in feeling, not in agreement with doctrine, but in the possibility of a specific, thoroughly universalisable experience." (12)
Perniola combines this Catholicism without orthodoxy with a faith without dogma developed in the second chapter: "This book is particularly addressed to those who are allergic to dogmas and sermons because they consider them to be an expression of dishonesty and hypocrisy. To be ordered to believe in something specific and to behave in a certain way stands in sharp contrast to the solemn sovereign importance of an institution and deeply offends the religious sensibility, which thrives even more than philosophy and art alone in a climate of freedom and magnanimity. It is precisely these special traits that are responsible for the attraction of the oriental religion and which once belonged to Catholicism. It remains to be understood how it has been possible for Catholicism to transform itself in the course of half a millennium into an ideologically political apparatus based on an ever-expanding dogmatic foundation, for which the key concept of faith stands." (27) Perhaps, however, The Young Pope still contains many rudiments of this power of fascination, to which the Catholic sensibility is more than susceptible.
Just for the sake of completeness: The other chapters of this philosophical study are called:
III Hope without superstition
IV Charity without humiliation
V Catholicism, humanism and difference
VI The ritual feeling
I will briefly discuss the latter in the final section.
The demand for a ban on images
I am particularly interested in the second episode, which, with the Pope's first public address, which everyone has been waiting for for a long time, represents the first climax in the plot structure. The contradictions that Pope Pius XIII creates run through this second episode in particular and can also be analysed here. The audience that Pius XIII grants his employees shows an erratic, enigmatic pope. The image of the Pope that The Young Pope creates does not allow us to look behind his intentions and opinions, but it does make us constantly question them. The media-generated question is thus provocative: "What does the Pope want for Catholicism and for the Church?" - as if we were talking about a real person - only to withdraw this answer in the next moment through the contradictory symbolic structure of the text.
The Vatican's press officer, Sofia Dubois, would like to have new advertising plates made for papal tourism. But the Pope is marked by image aversion. Don't look at me, I'm the Pope, so to speak! The only possible papal portrait plate that Pius XIII will authorise is an empty plate, which the press officer immediately over-interprets in this ambivalence as a message that apparently only Christ counts. But the pontiff is serious about the peculiar ban on images, which one has the impression that he is only just producing it himself at this moment: the Pope's photographer is dismissed. Pius XIII wanted to be invisible during his first address.
Sister Mary's dictum that the Pope has no interest in diplomacy proves to be more than true, and this peculiar circumstance that he does not want to be portrayed and shown, but also does not intend to present himself to the faithful, is emphasised by the newly elected Pope with an exemplary illustration from cultural history. He asks the press officer: "The most important author?" She replies Philip Roth, which the Pope immediately corrects to Salinger. "The most important film director?" is the next question. Spielberg, she says. No, Kubrick, says the Pope. "The most important contemporary artist?" She leaves it open to Jeff Koons or Marina Abramovic, but it's according to the infallible: Banksy. The most important electronic music group, according to the Pope, is Daft Punk. What do all of the above have in common, or perhaps a certain facet of Catholic sentiment is expressed when the numinous and mysterious that surrounds these people is utilised? That's right, and the Pope emphasises this: none of them has appeared in public. Hardly any of them have allowed themselves to be photographed.
Lenny Belardo wants the first homily to be announced with this initial thrust. The reference to the cultural examples is thus also an anticipation of the decidedly peculiar content of the Pope's first speech, the thundering command: Do not look at me, in which Catholic sentiment is contradicted on the one hand, but in which it is expressed in its traditionalist dimension like nowhere else: the hierarchy is not to be available. During his first address, the Pope is plunged into darkness over St Peter's Square at night and must not be illuminated. He brutally reproaches the faithful for having forgotten God. The fact that this arrogant and confident gesture actually conceals a great deal of insecurity, even incompetence, is only revealed to the audience in private glimpses: Here, the Catholic sensibility empathises with the head of the church and sees behind the otherwise concealing veil: Pope Pius is visiting Cardinal Spencer, his arch-conservative mentor, who, however, no longer wants anything to do with his protégé Lenny. Lenny's election as Pope has destroyed Spencer's life, who thought he was a shoo-in. Nevertheless, Lenny asks him during this visit to help him with his first public speech: "Write the speech with me; I can't do it alone."
With this openness, strange before Spencer, The Young Pope again draws in an ambivalence already familiar here. What is it really like? Has Pius XIII's seemingly unambiguous stance been broken? Was it already clear that he did not want to show himself to the crowd in St Peter's Square and is this just an evasion because he is incapable of giving a speech? Or is he more convinced than it seems when he admits his incapacity and is he really just testing Spencer's readiness? Another, decidedly strange decision, as a result of which Pius XIII apparently wants to open his pontificate with a crusade, is revealed in a conversation with the Prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy, whom Pius XIII has summoned for a private interview.
When asked what he thought of him, the prefect explained that Belardo was a pupil of Cardinal Spencer, who had a reputation for being a conservative, and that the Pope's name Pius was also a cause for concern. He himself was not a conservative. The questions that Pope XIII then asks him are clearly of a private nature, the first of which is even protected by the secrecy of the conclave: "Did you vote for me in the College of Cardinals? Are you homosexual? The answers are no and yes. The Pope's plan in the coming episodes will be to remove homosexuals from the leadership of the Church. Such actionism, committed to a strange moral doctrine, is also part of the series in its rigid and cold unambiguousness.
Two points in particular from Perniola's study of Catholic feeling are addressed in the second episode of the first season: A Catholicism without orthodoxy and a faith without dogma. The Young Pope actually formulates an antagonism and a provocation for both: the Catholicism shown is by no means without orthodox aspirations, indeed it actually lives from the tension Sorrentino deliberately sets between preserving orthodoxy and breaking it; the traditional dogma, in the context of which Pius XIII takes over the leadership of the church, but which he also sets himself, is also an irresolvable paradox. We need only recall the ban on smoking in the Apostolic Palace, which, as he is told, was issued by John Paul II - i.e. the Pope - and which Pius XIII allowed to remain in force for all, preserving tradition, but which he cancelled only for himself by a decision based on his papal dignity.
The ritual feeling and the props in The Young Pope
I will only briefly mention the ritual feeling described by Perniola, which characterises Catholic feeling as a whole. In contrast to Protestant accusations against the Catholic, it is said: Behind this accusation lies a deep-seated lack of understanding of Catholic feeling, which is ritualistic and by no means subjective or idiological. (66) To this end, The Young Pope series contains all kinds of scenes based on ritual formations, visualising ritual ornamentation, ceremonial or the Holy Mass itself.
Perniola writes: "But what does ritual feeling mean? At first glance, the term appears to be an oxymoron, i.e. a combination of two presumably contradictory terms. It is commonly assumed that feeling is essentially subjective, spontaneous, immediate and non-formalistic, while ritual is characterised by formality, conventionality, stereotypes and strictness. The position taken in this study turns this common viewpoint on its head, which feeds on an anti-ritual prejudice [sic] firmly rooted in modernity that prioritises the spiritual over the physical, the internal over the external, life over form, intention over action. The 'anti-Roman complex', i.e. the criticism of Catholicism that accuses it of lacking truthfulness, honesty and authenticity, is largely based on this prejudice." (66)
Catholic feeling, however, makes Catholicism very truthful, honest and authentic and inseparably intertwines the seemingly paradoxical poles. Nevertheless, the tools related to ritual feeling often become outdated props in The Young Pope... After reacquiring the tiara, the papal crown, the Pope is carried into the reception hall on the sedia gestatoria and has also brought back the peacock feathers that emphasise his dignity. Conversely, the liturgically traditionalist essays by Martin Mosebach speak of the "heresy of formality": like a relic from the costume box, the traditional status symbols protrude into our interpretation as meaningful signs and confuse the ritual Catholic sensibility.
Catholic visions
In the further course of the plot, as a Catholic vision of how the Vatican world will continue, a new pope comes to power in the second season, when Pope Pius XIII has fallen into a mysterious coma, after the short term of office of Francis II, which was ended by a sudden accidental death: the enigmatic English nobleman John Paul III (John Malokovich). So in this world, too, there are two popes side by side, which, since Anthony McCarten's adaptation, are already a clear reference to Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, who died in 2023, and the reigning Pope Francis I, just as the play of names of the popes in Sorrentino's film is all over the place.
The future of art with an affinity for Catholicism is assured thanks to The Young Pope series and its sequel The New Pope. Perniola also sees the preservation of Catholic sentiment across "ideological[ ] deluges" guaranteed by artists. "This has given rise to the contradictory situation that Catholic feeling has continued to develop outside and independently of the Catholic Church, while the Church itself, in reaction to the generally culturally hostile climate created by the Enlightenment and positivism, has instead been forced to encase itself in a suffocating dogmatic and ideological armour." (143) In this respect, Sorrentino's series utilises a well-known model "between religious and aesthetic experience": the numinous (144), which Perniola subsumes under Catholic feeling. "The miracle, the 'mysterium tremendum', the 'absolutely other' character of God in the Old Testament establish the precondition into which the aesthetic experience of the sublime is grafted, understood as the feeling of one's own nothingness in the face of the superiority and power of nature." (145)
The fascinating force of the wealth of themes and the indissoluble complexity of the interlocking motifs in The Young Pope are evidence of this Catholic numinousness. Boris Klemkow writes in an essay published in the release of the Blu-ray box set as a summary of the cinematic achievement of this series: "In addition to its regular director of photography Luca Bigazzi, whose camerawork is both suitable for illustrating a textbook on image design and camerawork and could be exhibited in an art museum, the customised soundtrack by Lele Marchitelli, enriched with both classic and contemporary songs, and the equally elegant and pointed editing by Christiano Travaglioli play their part in making THE YOUNG POPE a seductive, sensual experience in the sense of Prof. Dr Marcus Stiglegger's theory of deduction."
Whether deduction, whether increasing fascination through enigmatic interpretative structures, whether creating presence, whether connecting to Catholic feeling, which is also possible outside the Catholic Church, The Young Pope becomes a major chapter in the history of Catholic literature and media in the 21st century. Finally, to return to this Catholic ban on viewing, this Noli me videre, this "Don't look at me! I am the Pope!": In his essay Die Lichter des Toren, the writer Botho Strauß writes: "ἀποκαλύπτω - I reveal, expose, not without echoes of 'shameless'. In contrast, the first and last fabric of religion consists of 'I do not show myself'. The horrors of exposure are the sensations that attract the doubters and unbelievers." So we add with Lenny Belardo, Pope Pius XIII, that we are in favour of veiling and leave the fabric of religion untouched because it wants to remain invisible to the Catholic sensibility.
