The Incredibly Disappointing HBO Series "The Young Pope"

The Incredibly Disappointing HBO Series "The Young Pope"

Since I am already a cultural Christian and have twelve years of Catholic education I could get into the language and concepts that this extremely well written series presented in the Roman Catholic Pagan traditions and ritual that go back to the sun god Alexander the Great several hundred years before the common era on the calendar. 

Being a distant none-Catholic makes it easy to understand what the actors in their impeccable dress and fabulous stage sets were attempting to do with "The Young Pope" starring actor Jude Law as Pope Pius XIII and his search, a learning curve (really), for God even after he has been elected the youngest pope in centuries of the crusty old Vatican business HQ.

The opening premise has all the old men, the cardinals, wondering how they elected such a young, and American pope (British actor Law doing this w/an American accent) as Lenny Belardo, a cardinal somehow of one of the dioceses of NYC. In episode nine, the best episode of the series, Belardo had somehow at one time "Shared power" with pedophile archbishop Kurtwell of Queens. (Queens is not a diocese but part of the Brooklyn-Queens Diocese) Kurtwell now under investigation for the Vatican in New York in the person of almost falling down constantly drunk Monsignor Father, soon to be cardinal, Gutierrez, one time rector of St. Peter's Basilica and its passages and crypts below. It is Gutierrez who Pius XIII befriends and talks and walks around at night in the basilica to find out the down and dirty of everything political in the Vatican. 

Pius imports Sister Mary to be his gatekeeper. Sister Mary was the nun who was in charge of Lenny in the orphanage when his hippy parents dumped him there in order to travel lighter on a "trip to Venice". This is a background theme of the whole series episodes 1-10 - both the separation anxiety of being dumped by his parents and the floating protection of the substitute mother figure of Sister Mary, played beautifully by actress Diane Keaton.

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The Incredibly Disappointing HBO Series "The Young Pope"