Meet the New Pope, Same as the Old Popes

May 20, 2025

by Titus Techera

The papacy has been remarkably often in the news in our rather anti-clerical and increasingly secular age, making history in ways noticed and unnoticed. In 2013, Pope Benedict XVI retired, which is pretty much unheard of. Two weeks later, the papal conclave gave the world the first South American pope, Francis, who spent his 12-year papacy making headlines as well as serious changes to the Catholic Church.

  After his death on April 21, Easter Monday, another conclave was summoned. On May 8, it gave the world another shock: the first American pope, Leo XIV. The new pope has said that he chose his name to honor Leo XIII’s (1878-1903) teaching regarding social questions raised by the industrial revolution, presented in the famous encyclical Rerum Novarum.

  Some striking coincidences made me think again of the HBO miniseries The Young Pope (2016), written and directed Paolo Sorrentino, Italy’s last remarkable film artist. In the context of the Francis papacy, Sorrentino came up with a story of the world’s first American pope, Pius XIII (played in a career-defining role by Jude Law), a young, beautiful, manly, aggressive, and impossibly reactionary leader setting Christianity against the modern world. In his first address from the balcony in St. Peter’s, Pius denounces “free will, liberation, emancipation.” The show is a challenge to complacency and decadence wrought by these principles.

  Even the papal name that Law’s character chooses, Pius, points to the anti-modern popes of the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as to Pius XII, the last pope before the Second Vatican Council. He is an intentional throwback to the time before the Church made its peace with liberalism. Sorrentino’s pope is not just an American, but an orphan, a child and a victim of the sexual revolution, abandoned by hippie parents, and raised by nuns,including Sister Mary, played by Diane Keaton.

  Pius is tempted, in a dream, to modernize the church, to accept everything formerly condemned as sin, every kind of sexual fantasy, genetic experimentation, abortion and suicide. That vision is, of course, our ordinary world. The question of the story is whether the nightmare can be reversed, whether faith can save people, or at least Catholics. Could one man, even a pope, even if he had God on his side, stand between modern man and moral horror? Sorrentino makes this experiment, involving everything beautiful and everything ugly, from miracles to Vatican politics, and shows how divided against ourselves the rest of us, compared to a pope who refuses compromise.

  Artists have seldom treated the papacy since the popes lost their political authority in Italy and elsewhere, certainly not first-rate artists. But there are good reasons to take Sorrentino seriously. First, a pope’s words still matter in the way no other man’s words matter, not only because of the large audience, but because of the respect or even awe in which they are held. Considering the pope as a writer and speaker, who is his equal? Are there any others who even count? One of the increasingly old-fashioned features of the papacy is that its influence is still transmitted by language. That means it’s still a great subject for drama.

  Second, as was shown by Paul II, in the new democratic world of mass media, a pope can be a “public figure” at a level above ordinary politicians. We rely on customary separations, of politics and religion, of public and private life, as well as other domains, like commerce and morality. The pope is not bound by these limits. That’s what intellectuals or artists might call a post-modern posture in someone they liked. In The Young Pope, Pius makes the most of this new possibility, getting involved in political fights, as well as taking on the media, not unlike scandalous populist leaders in the real world.

  What is the use of such fame? In The Young Pope, it’s to restore the unity of man against modern divisions. Pius pronounces both wittily and bitterly on the failures of our times from the timeless perspective of the papal office and reflects on his experience as a fallen creature looking for redemptive love. Humorously, Sorrentino twists the modern tendency to reevaluate old villains as heroes by offering the pope as the authority figure we secretly long for.

  The choice of the pope as the hero to fight against, as Evelyn Waugh put it, “The enemy at last plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off: the Modern Age in arms,” is Sorrentino’s answer to the mood of the times. Against freedom of choice, Pius asserts a power to forbid. Unsurprisingly, he rejects the sins of the flesh. But his bigger challenge to modernity is that he rejects the unseriousness of tourists. In one scene, Pius has St Peter’s doors closed against visitors. He suggests they’re no better than his irresponsible parents—they always leave.

  In a situation that people increasingly experience not as Progress (i.e. a clear path to a clear goal) but as blind fate, full of trouble and uncertainty, the power to say no seems the rarest, perhaps most important thing. The pope is, once again, exciting because he is the one man who seems like he could hold back the tide while most people feel they are at the mercy of impersonal “forces” or “phenomena.” In The Young Pope, the mystery of the Christian faith is embodied by Pius. Even his closest collaborators aren’t sure whether he’s enacting divine providence or destroying Catholicism by forcing people to live up to a demanding faith in an age of extreme softness.

  As Pius piles splendor upon splendor, from the tiara to the kissing of the velvet slippers, in contempt for the weakness of his all-too-human cardinals and other minions, he restores personal authority over impersonal bureaucracies. Once again the effect is “postmodern”: Pius uses the historical resources of Catholicism to create mystery and desire in the digital age. His entrance in Renaissance luxury into the Sistine Chapel to lay down the law to his cardinals suggests our times are comparatively shabby.

  Pius's tactics are primarily about forbidding and denial. He closes churches against sinners, does not let himself be seen, quarrels with the commercialization and branding of the institution. The strength of the papacy has not taken that form in a long time, but it recalls the era of papal interdicts. Sorrentino’s suggestion is that a force that stands against nihilism must lead men repentance, atonement, and acquisition of grace by saying “no” rather than accepting their weakness. Sorrentino uses the devices of the age of “art as religion” to remind people of religion at the very moment when the resources of Enlightenment seem to be failing.

  Rationalism might not be as rational as faith. Both may fail to reform human nature, but only the latter can deal with that difficulty. As the old Church knew, art is part of the remedy. The Young Pope does not suggest churches will fill up again, but it shows that the power of beauty over our hearts is much greater than we commonly realize.

  I cannot do justice to the show in a brief essay—I can only show its ambition to diagnose our situation. I’ll close with some evidence for these claims. In an early scene, Pius and a childhood friend escape containment in the Vatican and go wandering at night. In a luxurious restaurant, they meet a beautiful prostitute who tells them some of her clients say she’s proof of the existence of God, but that she disagrees—she thinks she sees in the human eye the proof of the existence of God. Let’s not quarrel with how unrealistic this scene is. The point is that love of beauty implies the existence of the soul and therefore something other than materialism. Most of our artists as well as other public figures have forgotten that—Sorrentino has not.

  The only thing more surprising than a major cinematic production that embraces the remarkable beauty and power of the papacy would be an actual pope doing something similar. The former has happened, so why not the latter, too? Artistic and popular interest in the papacy spring from the same root. They’re both attempts to recover something of the past in a moment of great uncertainty, including the hope that the past is not just a museum that we visit and leave like tourists. I think Sorrentino is right about the mood of our times. Secularism as a fashionable opinion is exhausted. And I suspect most people, including those of us who are not Catholics, would breathe a sigh of relief to see the papacy help restore the activity and confidence of our civilization.

Titus Techera is the Executive Director of the American Cinema Foundation and a culture critic for think tanks including Liberty Fund and the Acton Institute. He teaches in the Manhattan Institute Logos Fellowship and is a Visiting Fellow at the Mattias Corvinus Collegium in Budapest.