Examining “The Young Pope” in light of contextual theology

By B.A.

THE title of Paolo Sorrentino’s Vatican drama “The Young Pope” has been met with confusion and derision. Many see it as a simplistic description of his age, others an allusion to his spiritual maturity. Both are integral to understanding this compelling character, and the show draws a clear thread between Pius XIII’s (Jude Law) difficult formative experiences and his religious beliefs. “The Young Pope” is an exercise in contextual theology: only by considering the pontiff's life as a young boy can we begin to understand his current position.

Orphaned as a child, Pius has not accepted his past or forgiven the parents that deserted him. His fellow Cardinals regard his behaviour as that of a “vindictive little boy”. He lashes out at his contemporaries. He taunts his confessor by suggesting that he may or may not believe in God, and manipulates him into divulging people’s secret sins. He is irritable, intransigent and whimsical, scorning an entire breakfast in favour of a diet cherry Coke. When an elderly Sister kisses Pius’s face, he wipes away the affection with a napkin and gives her a lecture that brings her to tears. There is an alarming continuity between the resentful, grudge-holding man on the papal throne and the despondent boy given up by his parents. “You’ve never budged from the front gate of that orphanage,” a Cardinal tells him, “where one fine day, without explanation, your parents abandoned you.”

Indeed, Pius surrounds himself with parental surrogates such as Cardinal Michael Spencer (James Cromwell) and Sister Mary (Diane Keaton). Both have their concerns that unresolved childhood anxieties might negatively affect Pius’s papacy. “Your personal aches, your enormous sufferings, your terrible memories—they must take a back seat,” she says. Pius is no longer to think of himself as a fatherless, motherless boy, because he is now Father and Mother of the Catholic Church. But it is a role that he cannot identify with; his first pontifical address was cold and impersonal—“I will never be with you”—because his faith grew out of his cold abandonment.

Saint Anselm considered theology to be “faith seeking understanding” (fides quaerens intellectum). The “seeking” can only be done by an individual with a particular set of views, conditioned by a particular set of circumstances. All theology, then, is contextual.

Theology has always been done in this way, both at community and individual levels. Liberation theology, for example, which was championed in Latin America in the 1950s and 1960s, arose in a time of stark inequality and argued that God offered a “preferential option for the poor”. Frustrations with white patriarchies led to the development of feminist, black and queer theologies. Contemporary theology, meanwhile, has emphasised the Bible’s anti-imperial passages, which have been taken up by Occupiers railing against Wall Street and critics of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. A notable example of an individual whose theology is informed by their social conditions is Pope Francis: his “theology of the people” extends its roots back to his work with marginalised communities in his native Argentina.

“The Young Pope” wants viewers to understand the context informing Pius's behaviour, which in this pontiff's case is his childhood. In espousing the idea that human belief in God arises out of a childish feeling of helplessness when faced with a daunting universe, the series also bears significant traces of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic reading of religion. He considered belief in God to be little more than wish fulfillment, arguing that “a personal God is, psychologically, nothing other than an exalted father,” the appeal of which is obvious to an individual whose faith was forged in an orphanage “in the cold and the dark of night”. Freud, as he often did, overstated his case. But where he got it right, and where “The Young Pope” gets it right, is in highlighting that individual approaches to theology grow out of particular human experiences.

Pius, however, has yet to make that connection for himself. He wrongly presumes that his “needs are the same as those of a billion Catholics”; he does not acknowledge that individuals turn to God for myriad reasons, from a variety of starting points. The most successful and empathetic religious leaders are aware of these variances, and will preach and act in ways that honour them. But this level of empathy requires a maturity that Pius doesn’t yet possess, one that he will only be able to attain by confronting his own demons. Whether that confrontation will take place is one of the mysteries of the series; whether it will destroy the Church in the process is quite another.

Pius XIII is an unlikely man of the cloth, taken from the same mould as Graham Greene’s “whisky priest” (though his substance of vice is tobacco), or, more recently, Rob Lowe’s cocky Father Jude in “You, Me and the Apocalypse”. Mr Law convincingly depicts the limping spiritual journey of a troubled man. Mr Sorrentino may have frustrated some viewers with the lack of insight into Pius’s inner workings, but as the series continues to lift from the ground, the young pontiff’s questionable objectives will become clearer. Viewers may come to temper their scorn with an empathy that Pius himself wouldn’t understand.