In 2016, Paolo Sorrentino introduced the world to Lenny Belardo, aka Pope Pius XIII, vicar of Christ, bishop of Rome, drinker of Cherry Coke Zero. The Young Pope followed Belardo (Jude Law) as he evolves from reactionary conservative to reactionary atheist to semi-liberal church leader — he remains a delightful prig throughout — before collapsing in Venice. The limited series would have ended there were it not for the downfall of House of Cards. The Italian writer and director provided a fresh den of vipers, cads, and hypocrites for viewers and critics to relate to and despise. If network executives doubted the reality of miracles before, they had to reconsider after seeing the series’s ambiguous conclusion, which paved the way for The New Pope.
The new season opens with Pius comatose and the Vatican facing a cult dedicated to his memory, an Islamic caliphate, and internal backbiting that would make the Borgias blush. Belardo may have been elected by the breath of the Holy Spirit, but his successor will be chosen by a cabal of church leaders led by Cardinal Angelo Voiello (Silvio Orlando), the scene-stealing, all-knowing secretary of state and blackmail artist. Pius’s absence leaves the viewer with a church reduced to mere men. Mere men who, after a brief detour, settle on John Paul III, a depressed, indifferent aristocrat played by John Malkovich (whose indifference extends to his British accent). But all that striving proves ephemeral when faced with the spiritual. Human fingers foretold King Belshazzar’s death and the ensuing division of his empire between two rival camps in the book of Daniel. Even in a coma, Pius achieves similar ends with the twitch of his hand.
And we’re off. Voiello and company battle a rival group of Vatican insiders for control of the world’s 1 billion Catholics. There is crowd surfing, blackmail, Michelangelo’s Pieta, glory holes (yes, glory holes), toolshed liaisons, Sharon Stone, and women prostituting themselves to the tune of Ave Maria. Sorrentino’s Vatican was always rife with hypocrisy, but when its spiritual core lies brain-dead in a cursed Venetian palace, anarchy reigns. That much becomes clear in the opening credits, as cloistered nuns shed their habits and rave before a neon crucifix that distorts Paolo Veronese’s The Wedding at Cana.
There is nudity, gratuitous nudity, male and female — a staple of prestige television ever since Tony Soprano launched the golden age from a New Jersey strip club. Yet Sorrentino’s use of nudity has more in common with Dante Alighieri than David Chase. Much like the sirens of Purgatorio, The New Pope contorts beauty into ugliness and vice versa as long as Pius sleeps. All of Rome’s beauty from the first season — the papal garments, architectural grandeur, and Renaissance frescoes — returns, but it is rendered hollow by the spiritual void left by Pius. Such ugliness cannot be contained. It spills into the world, from well-manicured estates in Great Britain to the banks of Lourdes.
Sorrentino has his finger on the pulse of the divisions within the church and Europe. The New Pope touches on the role of nuns, the Vatican’s rumored gay lobby known as the Lavender Mafia, the actual Mafia, Muslim refugees and Islamic terrorism, and the effect of immigration on both culture and labor. There is no “borrowed from the headlines” Law and Order moralizing. One advantage of creating a world populated only by bad men, sinners – if you will– is that there is no white hat, even if your subject wears one.
“I do not perform miracles. I simply find myself at the center of coincidences,” Pius says at one point.
Sorrentino’s greatest attribute as a writer is charity, which extends not just to his characters but to the partisans they represent. He respects his own opinion enough to allow opponents to make good faith arguments. Such an approach may garner accusations of “false equivalence,” but it gives Sorrentino the advantage of prescience. One can presume that he wrote the show in 2017 and early 2018. Malkovich’s John Paul III is a devotee of Cardinal John Henry Newman and supports allowing priests to marry. One month after the series made its festival debut, the cardinal became St. John Henry Newman, and church leaders debated married priests at the October 2019 Amazon synod.
Sorrentino’s critical acclaim goes beyond his reputation as an auteur. Journalists appreciate novelty, and postmodernists appreciate shock. The New Pope has both in spades, from the stripper nuns to one character’s declaration that there is no difference between a saint and a whore. Journalism, art for the lazy, has ignored all that and focused instead on Marilyn Manson’s cameo. It is shocking (shocking!) when John Paul III invites the musician behind Antichrist Superstar to the Vatican. What is more shocking is Manson’s confusion when he gets there.
“Marilyn Manson doesn’t know who I am,” Malkovich’s character says. There is no better statement about the irrelevance of the church in the modern world, but Sorrentino makes the scene an equally clear indictment of a secularism that does not even know what it is rebelling against.
The success of The Young Pope in a faithless age has inspired Hollywood to take Catholicism seriously again. It is worth noting that The Young Pope’s award nominations focused on costume, set design, and Jude Law’s first solid performance since … well, his first solid performance. Netflix’s dark-horse awards darling is The Two Popes, a film centered on Pope Francis (Jonathan Pryce) and Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI (Anthony Hopkins) as the latter sets to retire. The beautiful gardens and marble statues are incidental features to what amounts to a character study.
Catholicism peaked in the United States in the aftermath of World War II, when Ven. (soon to be St.) Fulton Sheen filled the nation’s airwaves and “Hillbilly Thomist” Flannery O’Connor filled its bookshelves. Sorrentino echoes another author of the era. J.F. Powers won the 1963 National Book Award for Morte D’Urban, which documents the eponymous priest’s transition from modernist champion to Catholic traditionalist as he grapples with his order’s benefactor and faith. That kind of success would be unimaginable for a Catholic artist as the church fades in social influence — the Pew Research Center found that self-identified ex-Catholics are about as numerous as every mainline Protestant sect combined. Sorrentino’s vision may be pornographic and heretical, but it has made artists, both secular and religious, look at the Catholic Church in a renewed light, even if it is neon.
Bill McMorris is a senior editor at the Washington Free Beacon.
