Paolo Sorrentino's The New Pope is a show about fanaticism: specifically, about the kind of passionate devotion that goes past love or even reference to become a dogmatic, unflinching worldview. It follows John Brannox, who reluctantly becomes Pope John Paul III in the wake of his popular predecessor's unexpected near-death. The first thing we see in Brannox's residence is his elderly parents, unspeaking and unmoving, bound to wheelchairs with oxygen masks covering their faces. They are devoted to the memory of John's dead twin brother, Adam—a brilliant writer and religious thinker whose shadow covers John's entire life.
In death, Adam became an institution. And his quieter, tenderer, more sensitive brother suffered for it. His parents stopped speaking to him after Adam's death. Their meeker living son means less to them than Adam's brilliant memory. The papacy of John Paul III is defined, in part, by this, and by John's slow reckoning with the burden of being himself—or, as he puts it, of being entirely forgotten.
But there's another, steeper shadow covering John's papacy: that of his predecessor, the chain-smoking New Yorker Lenny Belardo, better known as Pius XIII. In life, Pius was magnetic and controversial; in (what amounts to) death, he is remembered as a miracle worker and a saint, a stunning and epochal force—perhaps the most influential Christian since Jesus Christ himself.
Lenny's story is told in an earlier series, The Young Pope. If its sequel is primarily a tale about fanaticism, then The Young Pope is more specifically about the kind of man who births fanatics. Lenny Belardo is outrageous, both politically and personally: he is a rude, haughty man who demands obedience, and an arch-conservative Catholic whose positions against abortion and gay marriage are harsh enough to shock even his fellow conservatives. Yet he is also incredibly intriguing: an unreadable enigma, who intends to turn the church into an extension of his forbidding, mysterious self.
The Young Pope, in other words, is a story about charisma—a word that has political, cultural, and religious connotations. Lenny compares himself directly to celebrities at some point: he wants to be the Daft Punk of popes, and compulsively refuses to let any photo of him be taken. To the Italian prime minister, he explains that he can use wield his charisma as a weapon: "While a Catholic might disobey the Pope, they'd never disobey Christ. I'm already the former, but believe me: if I want to, I can have myself accredited as the latter as well." His exceptional handsomeness—which is commented upon explicitly and repeatedly—is a part of his arsenal. And to underscore this, The Young Pope fills the Vatican with memorably plain and ugly faces: an ocean of non-beauty against which Jude Law's chiseled face shines out like a beacon, or maybe a miracle.
But it's the Christian meaning of the word charisma that's most relevant here. It specifically refers to divinity, and even more specifically to miracles. The word originates from a Greek term that means a favor or gift—namely, a gift from God or from the gods, a living proof of God's realness and power. "Charismatic Christians," as a denomination, believe in the literal supernatural reality of miracles, and claim to experience those supernatural moments themselves. And it's this charisma that defines Pius XIII: his followers' belief that he is genuinely supernatural, and therefore speaks for God. Lenny cultivates this belief, using the mystery of his handsome face to tempt Catholics into seeing him as unknowable, unreachable, an outright miracle. He obsesses over his own mystery, not because it makes him alluring, but because he knows it makes him superhuman.
Charisma is power, in other words. It is what grants the Church its ability to insist that Catholics must place it and Christ above their families, above their nations, above the human world they live in. Pius is unmoved by pleas, by evidence of suffering: suffering is human, and God transcends it. He articulates a vision of the Church that's borderline inaccessible, harsh and hostile to everyday worshippers; as he says to one of his employees, he despises familiar relationships, and insists on only having formal ones, as clear as water, as definite and unmoving as stone.
That word, familiar, also holds important meaning. Lenny Belardo is an orphan; his life is defined by the moment that his parents abandoned him, cutting him off from the earliest and most primitive form of love and connection. "An orphan lacks a first love," he confesses, in an eventually-discovered love letter. "That's the source of his awkwardness, his naiveté." By time time we meet him, all awkwardness and naiveté has been lost—or at least, carefully papered-over and transformed. He now intends the Church to do to its followers what his parents did to him: abandon them, torturing them into striving to meet an unreachable, unknowable standard. He will inflict such a strictness upon his followers, such a coldness, that they will have no choice but to shed their humanity, and become divine.
Cruelty, power, and charisma are inseparable—or so it seems. Even the most liberal cardinals in the Vatican swear off sex, romance, marriage, and family. This is what it means to be devoted to God. Lenny's conservatism would eliminate all softness, forgiveness, and humanity from Catholicism, but his is just a vision of the Church pushed to an extreme. This is already the Catholic church's nature, The Young Pope suggests. Its rigidity and inflexibility, its stern and at-times-inhuman demands, are what elevate its Christians. It makes something more of them, something holier, purer, more powerful, more divine.
Sorrentino's crucial and fascinating insight is that chastity is not just an elimination of excitement or pleasure. It is a fetish in and of itself. Both The Young Pope and The New Pope revel in this, depicting the exaggerated formality of the Vatican as not only pleasurable, but campy. It remixes chants and hymns with club music, pop songs, and tribal beats. As Lenny Belardo strips naked and dons his papal vestments, covering himself with so many layers of clothing and jewelry that his body becomes indiscernible, we realize that this is the reason for his baroque adornments: not just that he is concealing his body, but that he is emphasizing the fact that his body needs to be concealed.
At times, this campiness undercuts the self-seriousness of Catholicism. At other times, it underscores it: making it clear that this is the allure, borderline-erotic, of the Church itself. Authority as ecstasy; repression as charisma. The urge to self-deny becomes a form of maddening eros in and of itself: next to it, yearning and desire seem softer, weaker, more familial. Human, but less intriguing for being so.
Lenny is never described outright as a fascist, but his ideology and mannerisms are distinctly fascistic in nature. Fascism, too, is a fundamentally charismatic ideology: it worships action, sees violence as the ultimate form of action, and worships the permanent intolerance of death. In fascism, repression and tradition are eroticized; questioning or analyzing tradition is treasonous. Unity through exclusivity is the goal—and the only way to join its brotherhood is by rejecting or excising everything that sets you apart, embracing not only conformity but fetishizing the act of cutting the non-conformist parts of yourself away, violently mutilating every part of you that "doesn't belong," ritualistically celebrating your own murder.
As Pope, Lenny would eliminate everything human about himself, up to and including his own face. As with his papal vestments, it's not simply the lack of his face that gives him power: it's his conveying, through denial, that his face is powerful enough to be worth concealing. He is eminently desirable; he is profoundly unobtainable. As The New Pope opens, with him lying in his coma, the nun who sponges off his body steps aside, lies down, and starts to masturbate: not furiously, but slowly, longingly, as if her lust for him is just another kind of sacrament.
If God was real, would He be less powerful? If we knew that He existed, would our worship of Him matter any less?
For Sorrentino, an agnostic, the answer seems pretty clear. More than any other show, The Young Pope and The New Pope go out of their way to tease us, with a narrative structure and visual compositions that act almost as flirtations. There is a central mystery to Lenny—a definitive mystery—that isn't resolved or even explained until near the end of The Young Pope. Before that, we don't even realize that there is a mystery: the resolution that we eventually get is illuminating, but it's not an answer, because we don't know enough to even ask a question. We only get the sense that there is something missing, something not-quite-clear, a central puzzle piece that holds the rest together—and its unspoken absence, rather than infuriating, is utterly compelling. And it only reveals himself well after Lenny reaches the limits of his would-be dictatorship, and his Church crumbles around him, and he starts taking the painful steps of allowing himself to be human.
For the Pius XIII who is worshipped in The New Pope is not the Pius XIII we were initially given. The Young Pope is a story about Lenny's reconciliation: he never renounces his charisma or his mystery, or even his initial conservative impulses, but he finds a way to let that coexist with the simple fact that he is human. He hurts; he mourns; he grieves; he is afraid. He is lost and he is frightened; if he doesn't fear or revere God as seems prudent, perhaps it's because not even God seems as distant as his own parents remain.
By undercutting the Church's conservatism with camp and ribald sexuality, The Young Pope keeps us from taking its religious politics at face value. But by taking Catholicism seriously, by leaning into its harshest worldview and most regressive beliefs, it allows the Vatican and Christianity itself to be treated as meaningful, not by surgically removing its ugliest features but by treating that ugliness with respect. It lends it a compassion, in other words, and tries to see this flavor of Catholicism as it sees itself. (One of the most striking scenes of the series is a debate about abortion between Lenny and his mentor, Cardinal Spencer—himself a deeply conservative man. It's striking because it's an argument about abortion between two men who despise abortion as a sin: the differences in their opinion are far more fascinating for how similarly they think, and for how much room they still find to disagree.)
This compassion, in the face of such intolerance, is a far more powerful rebuke of it than simple dismissal could ever be. The Young Pope is not potent because it is blasphemous; on the contrary, it's potent because it makes the shocking decision to keep the faith.
It is this legacy, this miraculous blend of charismatic divinity and humble humanity, that confronts John Brannox as he becomes John Paul III. Brannox is a moderate by comparison; he is soft-spoken; his central religious principle is that of The Middle Way, an attempted reconciliation between the arch-conservative Church and a more radical, progressive interpretation of it. Yet Brannox himself is a compromise, less a vote of confidence than the man who all the other cardinals tolerated the most. And he is haunted by Lenny's memory, and by the possibility of his return: noted serial sexual abuser Marilyn Manson pops up, at once point, blithely confused by the fact that this pope is much older than he remembers the exciting sexy pope being.
The Young Pope's pet political issue is not abortion but homosexuality: the question of whether gay cardinals should be excised from the Vatican, and why their sexuality would matter, when every cardinal is sworn to chastity. The New Pope is far more centered around female sexuality and women's rights, exploring desirability and desire, finding variations on sexuality and romantic love. A question is raised, several times, on whether the Catholic Church can find a way of granting equality to women without renouncing its own heavily-gendered policies; this paradox of uncompromising reconciliation, in which both parties are satisfied without sacrifice, is part of John Paul III's agenda. (At one point, an interesting solution to a problem is proposed; it's hard to tell whether or not it could hold up in practice, but it's a striking parable of finding a way to satisfy modernism and tradition without either yielding to the other.)
As with its treatment of Catholicism and camp, The New Pope finds ways of using sexuality to both undercut and bolster a vision of yearning and love as kinds of sacraments. At time, its sexuality is bawdy and grotesque, a defiant wink at the Church's restrictive beliefs. But sometimes, and often without warning, this gratuitous sexuality turns into a depiction of longing, the sort that touches on the soul. Visions of sexual desirability show up in the dreams of men who cannot yield to such desires; these visions aren't carnal or thrilling, but tender and aching and bittersweet. No naked body can be as striking as the right blend of hunger and deep sorrow in a tortured pair of eyes.
The tired cliché is to depict sexuality as a weapon, typically a tool employed by femininity against weak-willed and lustful men. Thankfully, The New Pope avoids this: its vision of charisma, after all, is achieved through sexual repression than through sexual indulgence. Instead, it depicts desire as a portal to something more vulnerable and human—not base or carnal, but simply small and person-sized, the antithesis of the divine. Sexual abuse is the denial of somebody's humanity: the reduction of them to an outlet, a means to an end, that severs the human connection for abuser and victim both. And at one point, a peculiar kind of sex work is depicted as flat-out holy: a kind of miracle in and of itself, granting a connection that feels outright impossible. (“Do you know what the difference is between a whore and a saint?” asks the woman who hires a self-described whore for her son. "None.")
This is reflected in The New Pope's spectacular series of title sequences, all of which depict nuns dancing erotically, in increasingly frenzied ways. On one level, it's part of the show's camp, its ongoing attempt to make a lurid spectacle out of the Catholic church—and to keep viewers' attentions through its never-ending series of sober discussions about faith and the nature of the Church. On another level, though, it's the first of many depictions of people dancing to reclaim, not their bodies or their sexuality, but their right to express themselves and their emotions. The majority of the show's ending credits feature characters dancing, in different places, to different songs—revealing both their comfort in themselves and their relationship with whoever happens to be watching. (One sequence, of a woman dancing post-divorce, was cut from HBO's version of the show, and it's a travesty: it's the apex of the show depicting playfulness as liberation, and even as a kind of salvation, the ultimate moment of a person realizing themselves.)
Against this stand the fanatics of Pius XIII, almost all of whom are women, clothing their bodies in formless hoodies emblazoned with Pius's finally-revealed face. Their reverence for the man once known as Lenny Belardo borders on sacrilegious: they believe that he was murdered by the Vatican, and that he has more claim to being the Catholic church than the Catholic church itself. They are devoted, not to the man, but to the miracle: they are the Catholics that Lenny once proclaimed he would create, forsaking everything but their devotion to his vision. Realized in the flesh, that vision seems more more like idolatry: they revere, not Lenny's forbidding Divine Father, but the charisma of Lenny Belardo himself.
There's something fascinating about the inverse trajectories of the two popes: Belardo recedes, Brannox advances. Lenny, who lives his life haunted by parents he can barely remember, learns to approach God, not as an absent father to emulate, but as an ear that will forever receive him as a young and confused child, and perhaps even forgive him. Brannox, whose life is haunted by living parents and by a dead brother he can remember all too well, discovers, at last, a new kind of charisma: the fieriness of an overlooked outcast, who seeks, not vengeance against those who overlooked him, but the power to behold all the others who were similarly overlooked.
In death, Adam became an institution. And his quieter, tenderer, more sensitive brother suffered for it. His parents stopped speaking to him after Adam's death. Their meeker living son means less to them than Adam's brilliant memory. The papacy of John Paul III is defined, in part, by this, and by John's slow reckoning with the burden of being himself—or, as he puts it, of being entirely forgotten.
But there's another, steeper shadow covering John's papacy: that of his predecessor, the chain-smoking New Yorker Lenny Belardo, better known as Pius XIII. In life, Pius was magnetic and controversial; in (what amounts to) death, he is remembered as a miracle worker and a saint, a stunning and epochal force—perhaps the most influential Christian since Jesus Christ himself.
Lenny's story is told in an earlier series, The Young Pope. If its sequel is primarily a tale about fanaticism, then The Young Pope is more specifically about the kind of man who births fanatics. Lenny Belardo is outrageous, both politically and personally: he is a rude, haughty man who demands obedience, and an arch-conservative Catholic whose positions against abortion and gay marriage are harsh enough to shock even his fellow conservatives. Yet he is also incredibly intriguing: an unreadable enigma, who intends to turn the church into an extension of his forbidding, mysterious self.
The Young Pope, in other words, is a story about charisma—a word that has political, cultural, and religious connotations. Lenny compares himself directly to celebrities at some point: he wants to be the Daft Punk of popes, and compulsively refuses to let any photo of him be taken. To the Italian prime minister, he explains that he can use wield his charisma as a weapon: "While a Catholic might disobey the Pope, they'd never disobey Christ. I'm already the former, but believe me: if I want to, I can have myself accredited as the latter as well." His exceptional handsomeness—which is commented upon explicitly and repeatedly—is a part of his arsenal. And to underscore this, The Young Pope fills the Vatican with memorably plain and ugly faces: an ocean of non-beauty against which Jude Law's chiseled face shines out like a beacon, or maybe a miracle.
But it's the Christian meaning of the word charisma that's most relevant here. It specifically refers to divinity, and even more specifically to miracles. The word originates from a Greek term that means a favor or gift—namely, a gift from God or from the gods, a living proof of God's realness and power. "Charismatic Christians," as a denomination, believe in the literal supernatural reality of miracles, and claim to experience those supernatural moments themselves. And it's this charisma that defines Pius XIII: his followers' belief that he is genuinely supernatural, and therefore speaks for God. Lenny cultivates this belief, using the mystery of his handsome face to tempt Catholics into seeing him as unknowable, unreachable, an outright miracle. He obsesses over his own mystery, not because it makes him alluring, but because he knows it makes him superhuman.
Charisma is power, in other words. It is what grants the Church its ability to insist that Catholics must place it and Christ above their families, above their nations, above the human world they live in. Pius is unmoved by pleas, by evidence of suffering: suffering is human, and God transcends it. He articulates a vision of the Church that's borderline inaccessible, harsh and hostile to everyday worshippers; as he says to one of his employees, he despises familiar relationships, and insists on only having formal ones, as clear as water, as definite and unmoving as stone.
That word, familiar, also holds important meaning. Lenny Belardo is an orphan; his life is defined by the moment that his parents abandoned him, cutting him off from the earliest and most primitive form of love and connection. "An orphan lacks a first love," he confesses, in an eventually-discovered love letter. "That's the source of his awkwardness, his naiveté." By time time we meet him, all awkwardness and naiveté has been lost—or at least, carefully papered-over and transformed. He now intends the Church to do to its followers what his parents did to him: abandon them, torturing them into striving to meet an unreachable, unknowable standard. He will inflict such a strictness upon his followers, such a coldness, that they will have no choice but to shed their humanity, and become divine.
Cruelty, power, and charisma are inseparable—or so it seems. Even the most liberal cardinals in the Vatican swear off sex, romance, marriage, and family. This is what it means to be devoted to God. Lenny's conservatism would eliminate all softness, forgiveness, and humanity from Catholicism, but his is just a vision of the Church pushed to an extreme. This is already the Catholic church's nature, The Young Pope suggests. Its rigidity and inflexibility, its stern and at-times-inhuman demands, are what elevate its Christians. It makes something more of them, something holier, purer, more powerful, more divine.
Sorrentino's crucial and fascinating insight is that chastity is not just an elimination of excitement or pleasure. It is a fetish in and of itself. Both The Young Pope and The New Pope revel in this, depicting the exaggerated formality of the Vatican as not only pleasurable, but campy. It remixes chants and hymns with club music, pop songs, and tribal beats. As Lenny Belardo strips naked and dons his papal vestments, covering himself with so many layers of clothing and jewelry that his body becomes indiscernible, we realize that this is the reason for his baroque adornments: not just that he is concealing his body, but that he is emphasizing the fact that his body needs to be concealed.
At times, this campiness undercuts the self-seriousness of Catholicism. At other times, it underscores it: making it clear that this is the allure, borderline-erotic, of the Church itself. Authority as ecstasy; repression as charisma. The urge to self-deny becomes a form of maddening eros in and of itself: next to it, yearning and desire seem softer, weaker, more familial. Human, but less intriguing for being so.
Lenny is never described outright as a fascist, but his ideology and mannerisms are distinctly fascistic in nature. Fascism, too, is a fundamentally charismatic ideology: it worships action, sees violence as the ultimate form of action, and worships the permanent intolerance of death. In fascism, repression and tradition are eroticized; questioning or analyzing tradition is treasonous. Unity through exclusivity is the goal—and the only way to join its brotherhood is by rejecting or excising everything that sets you apart, embracing not only conformity but fetishizing the act of cutting the non-conformist parts of yourself away, violently mutilating every part of you that "doesn't belong," ritualistically celebrating your own murder.
As Pope, Lenny would eliminate everything human about himself, up to and including his own face. As with his papal vestments, it's not simply the lack of his face that gives him power: it's his conveying, through denial, that his face is powerful enough to be worth concealing. He is eminently desirable; he is profoundly unobtainable. As The New Pope opens, with him lying in his coma, the nun who sponges off his body steps aside, lies down, and starts to masturbate: not furiously, but slowly, longingly, as if her lust for him is just another kind of sacrament.
If God was real, would He be less powerful? If we knew that He existed, would our worship of Him matter any less?
For Sorrentino, an agnostic, the answer seems pretty clear. More than any other show, The Young Pope and The New Pope go out of their way to tease us, with a narrative structure and visual compositions that act almost as flirtations. There is a central mystery to Lenny—a definitive mystery—that isn't resolved or even explained until near the end of The Young Pope. Before that, we don't even realize that there is a mystery: the resolution that we eventually get is illuminating, but it's not an answer, because we don't know enough to even ask a question. We only get the sense that there is something missing, something not-quite-clear, a central puzzle piece that holds the rest together—and its unspoken absence, rather than infuriating, is utterly compelling. And it only reveals himself well after Lenny reaches the limits of his would-be dictatorship, and his Church crumbles around him, and he starts taking the painful steps of allowing himself to be human.
For the Pius XIII who is worshipped in The New Pope is not the Pius XIII we were initially given. The Young Pope is a story about Lenny's reconciliation: he never renounces his charisma or his mystery, or even his initial conservative impulses, but he finds a way to let that coexist with the simple fact that he is human. He hurts; he mourns; he grieves; he is afraid. He is lost and he is frightened; if he doesn't fear or revere God as seems prudent, perhaps it's because not even God seems as distant as his own parents remain.
By undercutting the Church's conservatism with camp and ribald sexuality, The Young Pope keeps us from taking its religious politics at face value. But by taking Catholicism seriously, by leaning into its harshest worldview and most regressive beliefs, it allows the Vatican and Christianity itself to be treated as meaningful, not by surgically removing its ugliest features but by treating that ugliness with respect. It lends it a compassion, in other words, and tries to see this flavor of Catholicism as it sees itself. (One of the most striking scenes of the series is a debate about abortion between Lenny and his mentor, Cardinal Spencer—himself a deeply conservative man. It's striking because it's an argument about abortion between two men who despise abortion as a sin: the differences in their opinion are far more fascinating for how similarly they think, and for how much room they still find to disagree.)
This compassion, in the face of such intolerance, is a far more powerful rebuke of it than simple dismissal could ever be. The Young Pope is not potent because it is blasphemous; on the contrary, it's potent because it makes the shocking decision to keep the faith.
It is this legacy, this miraculous blend of charismatic divinity and humble humanity, that confronts John Brannox as he becomes John Paul III. Brannox is a moderate by comparison; he is soft-spoken; his central religious principle is that of The Middle Way, an attempted reconciliation between the arch-conservative Church and a more radical, progressive interpretation of it. Yet Brannox himself is a compromise, less a vote of confidence than the man who all the other cardinals tolerated the most. And he is haunted by Lenny's memory, and by the possibility of his return: noted serial sexual abuser Marilyn Manson pops up, at once point, blithely confused by the fact that this pope is much older than he remembers the exciting sexy pope being.
The Young Pope's pet political issue is not abortion but homosexuality: the question of whether gay cardinals should be excised from the Vatican, and why their sexuality would matter, when every cardinal is sworn to chastity. The New Pope is far more centered around female sexuality and women's rights, exploring desirability and desire, finding variations on sexuality and romantic love. A question is raised, several times, on whether the Catholic Church can find a way of granting equality to women without renouncing its own heavily-gendered policies; this paradox of uncompromising reconciliation, in which both parties are satisfied without sacrifice, is part of John Paul III's agenda. (At one point, an interesting solution to a problem is proposed; it's hard to tell whether or not it could hold up in practice, but it's a striking parable of finding a way to satisfy modernism and tradition without either yielding to the other.)
As with its treatment of Catholicism and camp, The New Pope finds ways of using sexuality to both undercut and bolster a vision of yearning and love as kinds of sacraments. At time, its sexuality is bawdy and grotesque, a defiant wink at the Church's restrictive beliefs. But sometimes, and often without warning, this gratuitous sexuality turns into a depiction of longing, the sort that touches on the soul. Visions of sexual desirability show up in the dreams of men who cannot yield to such desires; these visions aren't carnal or thrilling, but tender and aching and bittersweet. No naked body can be as striking as the right blend of hunger and deep sorrow in a tortured pair of eyes.
The tired cliché is to depict sexuality as a weapon, typically a tool employed by femininity against weak-willed and lustful men. Thankfully, The New Pope avoids this: its vision of charisma, after all, is achieved through sexual repression than through sexual indulgence. Instead, it depicts desire as a portal to something more vulnerable and human—not base or carnal, but simply small and person-sized, the antithesis of the divine. Sexual abuse is the denial of somebody's humanity: the reduction of them to an outlet, a means to an end, that severs the human connection for abuser and victim both. And at one point, a peculiar kind of sex work is depicted as flat-out holy: a kind of miracle in and of itself, granting a connection that feels outright impossible. (“Do you know what the difference is between a whore and a saint?” asks the woman who hires a self-described whore for her son. "None.")
This is reflected in The New Pope's spectacular series of title sequences, all of which depict nuns dancing erotically, in increasingly frenzied ways. On one level, it's part of the show's camp, its ongoing attempt to make a lurid spectacle out of the Catholic church—and to keep viewers' attentions through its never-ending series of sober discussions about faith and the nature of the Church. On another level, though, it's the first of many depictions of people dancing to reclaim, not their bodies or their sexuality, but their right to express themselves and their emotions. The majority of the show's ending credits feature characters dancing, in different places, to different songs—revealing both their comfort in themselves and their relationship with whoever happens to be watching. (One sequence, of a woman dancing post-divorce, was cut from HBO's version of the show, and it's a travesty: it's the apex of the show depicting playfulness as liberation, and even as a kind of salvation, the ultimate moment of a person realizing themselves.)
Against this stand the fanatics of Pius XIII, almost all of whom are women, clothing their bodies in formless hoodies emblazoned with Pius's finally-revealed face. Their reverence for the man once known as Lenny Belardo borders on sacrilegious: they believe that he was murdered by the Vatican, and that he has more claim to being the Catholic church than the Catholic church itself. They are devoted, not to the man, but to the miracle: they are the Catholics that Lenny once proclaimed he would create, forsaking everything but their devotion to his vision. Realized in the flesh, that vision seems more more like idolatry: they revere, not Lenny's forbidding Divine Father, but the charisma of Lenny Belardo himself.
There's something fascinating about the inverse trajectories of the two popes: Belardo recedes, Brannox advances. Lenny, who lives his life haunted by parents he can barely remember, learns to approach God, not as an absent father to emulate, but as an ear that will forever receive him as a young and confused child, and perhaps even forgive him. Brannox, whose life is haunted by living parents and by a dead brother he can remember all too well, discovers, at last, a new kind of charisma: the fieriness of an overlooked outcast, who seeks, not vengeance against those who overlooked him, but the power to behold all the others who were similarly overlooked.
“There is no place for you here,” they told us with their silence. “Then where is our place?” we implored them with our silence. We never received that reply, but now we know. Yes, we know our place. Our place is here. Our place is the Church.
Cardinal Biffi said it first, and in an astonishingly simple way: “We are all miserable wretches whom God brought together to form a glorious church.” Yes: we are all miserable wretches! Yes: we are all the same! And yes, we are the forgotten ones. But no longer. From this day forth, we shall no longer be forgotten, I assure you. They will remember us because we are the Church."
It is a human miracle, not a divine one. Yet it too is a transubstantiation: one of suffering to compassion, hurt to love. Those who were invisible become, not merely seen, but the ones who see. They reject the authority of the ones they hoped would see them and insist upon a new authority of their own: the right to become, and the duty of becoming, the ones who now bear witness.
Pius XIII envisioned empowerment through powerlessness: an ascent to divinity by means of sacrificing everything human. John Paul III offers a different vision: the empowerment of any one individual to empower others. Not a sacrifice of the self, but an acknowledgment of its worth, by offering who we are to others. There is a similar selflessness to it, but that selflessness has an altogether different meaning. Pius made himself charismatic by making himself unseeable; John Paul made himself charismatic by allowing himself to see.
Does God see us? Does God care?
I've heard many Christians reject atheism with the simple logic that, if God didn't exist, then the world would be too horrible for them to bear. (I was raised Jewish, and my experience has been that Jewish people have a somewhat different perspective, post-Holocaust, on how unbearable and horrible the world can be, God or no.) I even knew a woman who justified her Evangelical faith with the simplest logic possible: out of all the possible interpretations of God, she picked the one that seemed the easiest to follow, and the vision of redemption and heaven that would ask the least of her in the process.
The Young Pope and The New Pope have trickier thoughts about God than that. God doesn't seem to see us, yet God sees us; God doesn't seem to care about us, yet God cares. Through God's seeming betrayals, we both reject our faith and double down on it; our attempts to rebuild God in our own image turn out to be a blasphemy, but it is precisely for that blasphemy that God forgives us. This is true, it seems, whether or not God is in fact real. Whether God exists or not, in fact, seems to be the least relevant part of God's existence.
Charisma, the "gift from God," is similarly tricky. Belief in divine presence seemingly has nothing to do with whether or not the divine exists. That which feels divine, that which inspires awe and devotion and even dogma, might not be divine in the slightest; it may, in fact, be what drives people to blasphemy and cruelty and profoundly inhuman acts.
We can reject divinity, just as we can reject our own humanity. Yet in both cases, we still cry out: we crave humanity, we crave the divine. We seek miracles and magic as surely as we seek out our own face. We hunger for mystery. We respond to charisma, not because it is beautiful, but because it is transcendent—just as we respond to beauty, not because it is transcendent, but because it reminds us that we are not. We will always be drawn to what lies beyond, even though it means we risk leaving behind everything that's right in front of us, even though we risk creating something inhospitable, something antithetical to the idea of home. Yet we are also transcendent ourselves: we are the Other, we are the mystery, we are the unknowable world to everybody else. Charisma lies beyond us and within us. We ourselves are the divine gift. And we bestow that gift upon others, we grant them a divine favor that only we can grant, when we look upon them, not as divine, not as human, but as simultaneously human and divine.