36 The Nation. April 6, 2020
JUDE LAW (LEFT) AND JOHN MALKOVICH INTHE NEW POPE(GIANNI FIORITO / HBO)T
he Young Pope, the first part of an
HBO trilogy about the contemporary
papacy by director Paolo Sorrentino,
begins with a fake-out. Suntanned
47-year-old Lenny Belardo (Jude
Law) wakes to the round marimba tones of
an iPhone alarm. This is the first day of his
papacy as Pius XIII. He showers, dresses,
and passes through an antechamber full of
cardinals and greets a roaring crowd from
the balcony of the Apostolic Palace, above
the Piazza San Pietro. “We have for gotten
you,” he shouts to the masses. Then he
goes off script. “We have forgotten to
masturbate, to use contraceptives, to get
abortions, to celebrate gay marriages. We
have forgotten that you can decide to die
if you detest living.” The crowd falls si-
lent, three cardinals faint, and a swarm of
black-frocked priests rushes through the
antechamber like a SWAT team. “In short,
my dear, dear children, not only have we
forgotten to play. We have forgotten to be
happy,” Pius continues. “There is only one
road that leads to happiness. And that road
is called freedom.”
With that, he wakes up—for real this
time. The first day of his papacy is begin-
ning, but Lenny is not the grinning liberal
rhetorician of his dream. The former arch-
bishop of New York and first American
to become pope is stern and haughty; infact, he doesn’t sleep next to an iPhone.
And when he delivers his first homily as
Pius, he reprimands the crowd, “You have
forgotten God!... You need to know I will
never be close to you, because everyone is
alone before God.” He abruptly ends after
someone in the audience trains a green
laser pointer on his body. We hear claps of
thunder, rain begins to pour down, and the
unhappy throng disperses.
The conceit we are encouraged to take
from Pius’s dream—that a free-thinking,
iconoclastic pope would endorse many of
the same positions as 21st century liber-
al thinkers—is seductive. It imagines our
world as the source of truth and the clois-
tered Vatican as a backwater of esoteric
biases and taboos. But the idea appearsUNHOLY GHOSTS
Paolo Sorrentino’s The Young Pope and The New Pope
by ERIN SCHWARTZ
Erin Schwartz is managing editor of Study Hall
and a contributing writer to The Nation, where
she writes on television, books, and popular culture.