I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams

Pontification: On the Death of the Pope

1 7 5 On the Death of the Pope Pontification swiss guards in renaissance finery; solemn monks holding candles; a male choir chanting in the occult tongue of Latin; the anguished faithful, wracked with grief, clasping their hands in prayer or seeming to clutch at the passing bier; and, at the center of this deeply pagan drama, the dead pontiff, caught in midflight between the mortal and the marmoreal, the all too human and the already hallowed. Marilyn Manson, eat your heart out: nobody does High Gothic spectacle like the Vatican. Borne from the Apostolic Palace, through Saint Peter’s Square, and into Saint Peter’s Basilica on April 4, 2005, the earthly remains of John Paul II looked, for all the world, like a prop in a Gothic opera, his kabuki-white features contrasting melodramatically with his blood-red vestments. Robed and mitered, he looked doll-like, a chessset bishop sculpted in life-size proportions by Madame Tussaud, an unstrung puppet with his “feet turned outward awkwardly, the skin of his face chalky and drawn taut,” as the New York Times correspondents Elaine Sciolino and Daniel J. Wakin put it in their wonderfully poetic description of the scene.1 Under John Paul II, Team Vatican’s inquisitional intolerance for self-abuse,sex before wedlock,birth control,abortion,divorce,homosexuality , and other works and ways of the Devil cost it global market share. According to an op-ed by Thomas Cahill in the New York Times:“The situation is dire. Anyone can walk into a Catholic church P O N T I F I C A T I O N 1 7 6 on a Sunday and see pews,once filled to bursting,now sparsely populated with gray heads.”2 Even so, who can deny that, when it comes to ritualistic pomp and circumstance, Roman Catholicism simply knocks the spots off Religion , American-style? A devout atheist to the death, I stand, nonetheless , with the splenetic contrarian Camille Paglia, who never misses an opportunity to rant against what she perceives as the Church’s clueless attempts to rebrand itself, from Vatican II onward. “My dissatisfaction with American Catholicism, which partly began during my adolescence in the late 50’s, was due partly to its increasing selfProtestantization and suppression of its ethnic roots,” Paglia told the Buffalo News in April 1995.“Within 20 years, Catholic churches looked like airline terminals: no statues,no stained-glass windows,no Latin, no litanies, no gorgeous jeweled garments, no candles, so that the ordinary American church now smells like baby powder.”3 Indeed,the understated Grand Guignol of the pope’s posthumous procession, equal parts medieval mystery play and prime-time spectacle , offers a timely reminder that these are the people who brought you Saint Bartholomew,the flayed martyr with his skin flung jauntily over one shoulder, like Frank Sinatra on the cover of Songs for Young Lovers, and the beatified truck-stop waitresses Saint Lucy and Saint Agnes, serving up their plucked-out eyeballs and severed breasts on platters, like blue-plate specials. Yes,the pope has that futurrific little popemobile,and yes,the Holy See’s website is the bitchenest thing in online branding for Bronze Age belief systems. And yes, the Vatican e-mailed and IM’d the bad tidings about the Holy Father’s death to a breathless press. (What did you expect? An archangel with a flaming sword?) Even so, Catholicism , at its thorn-crowned, gore-dripping (sacred) heart, amounts to an inescapably pagan take on Christianity. With its martyrs and its miracles, its relics and its stigmata, its exorcisms and excommunications , the Holy Roman faith is the Christian Gothic. Is this why Catholics and lapsed Catholics are overrepresented in the congregation of Gothic novelists? The famously Catholic Flannery O’Connor wrestled with theological demons against a Southern 1 7 7 P O N T I F I C A T I O N Gothic backdrop, and Anne Rice, the Mother Confessor of palely loitering goths everywhere,was raised in a fervently Catholic household and once dreamed of being a nun. The Gothic aesthetic sprang from the brow of anti-Papist Protestants such as Matthew Lewis, who associated the Catholicism of the Middle Ages with inquisitional cruelties and a dogged hostility toward science and society’s first, feeble gropings toward the Enlightenment. (Go figure!) Lewis’s 1796 novel The Monk chronicled the secret, De...