Pious, lions, innocents: What does culture tell us about popes?

Urban VIII corresponded with Francisco de Quevedo, Alexander VII spent his leisure time as pope writing little poems in Latin, and John Paul II — who had studied St. John of the Cross in his youth — even published a collection of poems, Roman Triptych (2003), while still occupying the Chair of Saint Peter.

Yet the pope who most loved literature was probably also the pope who liked the ermine least: Francis taught literature in Argentina, enjoyed a friendly relationship with Jorge Luis Borges and, encouraged by the great fabulist, published some of his students’ stories. As pope, he went on to write a Letter to the Poets — in fact the preface to a book of religious verse — and a substantial papal document “on the role of literature in formation,” which quoted Proust and Celan.

On one occasion, Francis confessed that his students, bored with El Cid, asked him to read them something livelier: Lorca’s ballad “La casada infiel,” for example, which proved, in the Holy Father’s own words, more “spicy.” There is, then, a symmetry of meaning in the fact that, almost a century after the Grito hacia Roma was written, it was Jorge Mario Bergoglio who, as pope, received that poetic plea from Federico García Lorca addressed to “the man dressed in white.”

In 2024, Luis García Montero, as director of the Cervantes Institute, brought a multilingual edition of that poem by the writer to the Vatican — a poem born of a double existential anguish: the 1929 stock market crash Lorca witnessed from New York, and the Lateran Pacts being signed in Rome at the same time by Pius XI and Benito Mussolini.

In the United States, Lorca also attended “Protestant services,” which, to put it mildly, he did not praise. He wrote to his family that, by contrast, he had understood the “fervent spectacle, unique in the world” of the Mass we would now call the traditional rite. He was not the only artist to grasp it: after the Council, faced with liturgical changes, a group of writers and intellectuals — mostly non-Catholic — wrote to Paul VI asking that the old Latin rite not be lost. Among the signatories of the so-called “Agatha Christie indult” were — besides British sculptor Barbara Hepworth — Andrés Segovia, Iris Murdoch, María Zambrano, Robert Graves, Montherlant and, indeed, Borges.

Lorca, who had once been one of those children who played “at saying Mass, making altars, building little theaters…” had a relationship to Catholicism very close to his own life: much closer, say, than Graves, who was first an Anglican and later an atheist. That is natural in a poet who had grown up in the land of piononos, the sweet from the Spanish region of Granada dedicated to Pius IX after he proclaimed the Immaculate Conception.

And it is natural in a country where, whenever someone “is stubborn,” they unwittingly pay homage to the nation’s antipope: Benedict XIII, the Pope Luna. For that reason, the papacy can reappear freely in Lorca’s work in the early 1930s: “Towards Rome they walk / the two pilgrims / so that the Pope can marry them / oh mommy /because they are cousins.”

The pope who most loved literature was probably also the pope who liked the ermine least: Francis

The convert Evelyn Waugh reflects that, before Martin Luther and Elizabeth I, Catholicism could tolerate certain deviations or liberties that, after Trent, it could no longer allow. It was that internal latitude that allowed a medieval stonemason to give a monastery a satirical, mocking, simply caricatural capital. In Catholic countries, the familiarity would persist, and Lorca is a good example when he speaks of the papacy with the candor of his poem The Little Pilgrims or when, whether invoking or upbraiding it, he shouts to the Holy Father “from the tower of the Chrysler Building.”

But it is important to note that — in the tradition of what was called “Catholic Spain,” as in the whole European tradition before schisms and reforms — that familiarity does not always present the pope in flattering terms. On the contrary. Llull’s Blanquerna (13th century) offers, exceptionally, a pious and reverent view: a holy pope who, having fulfilled his mission, abdicates and becomes a hermit. But Dante, prince of medieval Christian poets, does not hesitate to send several popes, literally, to hell: depending on which Divine Comedy scholar you consult, we are speaking of three pontiffs or more than half a dozen.

In other words, however assumed and widespread papal authority over consciences may have been, the pope was scrutinized and held to account. Ayala’s chancellor, in his Rimado de palacio (14th century), compares the early pontiffs to his own times, saying they “never saw a pope die in poverty.” And, in passing, he lashes out, as Dante had already done, at a “simony that does much harm.”

That worldly wealth and grandeur of the popes would also serve to warn the people under pontifical leadership: François de Villon, in a literal ubi sunt, asks où est le tiers Calixte, while Spaniard Jorge Manrique (15th century) gives us a memento mori in an elegant, circumspect danse macabre: “And the high and mighty state / Of hereditary great / Dimmed and died; Dukes of royal name / Marquis and count of spotless fame / And baron brave / All these, O Death, hast thou concealed / In the dark.” Exemplary, but not overly pious toward the Supreme Pontiff.

That naturalness toward the successor of Peter is sometimes striking. In times of “the bad popes,” to borrow the title of E. R. Chamberlin’s fine volume, a ballad was written about the murder of Juan de Borja (1497), duke of Gandía. There, in the poem’s verses, we find a pope — Alexander VI — who, without anyone seeming surprised, asks after the whereabouts “of my son, the one of Gandía.” The Borgias’ escapades at the apostolic seat and its surroundings would almost become a literary genre with, among other works, the highly romanticized Chronicles published by Frederick Rolfe, better known as the Baron Corvo, at the turn of the 20th century.

Even more revealing are the diaries of Alexander VI’s cerimoniere, Johann Burchard, which have left us testimony of that court’s salacity: think of a banquet — the so-called chestnut feast — in which “fifty prostitutes” naked on the floor search for chestnuts. When the Sack of Rome occurred in 1527, it is not surprising that some, like the Erasmian Alfonso de Valdés in his Dialogue of Mercury and Charon, would justify it as a punishment for the papacy’s corruption. Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, a high-ranking diplomat, is credited a few decades later with another brutal dialogue, this one between Charon and the soul of Pedro Luis Farnese, son of Alessandro Farnese — in other words, a Paul III who was more father than saint.

That swamp of art and nepotism has continued to attract attention up to today, from series like The Borgias to novels such as En el nombre de Borgia (In the Name of Borgia, 2024) by Juanjo Braulio. The perception of the papacy as worldly power did enormous damage to its cause. From the earliest centuries of Christianity — from Leo the Great’s order in the 5th century to paint portraits of popes from St. Peter onward on the walls of the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls; even from the Catacombs of San Callisto in the year 200 A.D. — the successor of the prince of the apostles sought and secured primacy among the bishops of the West.

Rome would be the stage of that Petrine power, with a St. Peter’s Basilica that, raised by Constantine, based its legitimacy on the old Circus of Nero, the tomb of many martyrs. Such was Peter’s prestige that, when Ferdinand the Catholic, one of history’s great statesmen, wanted to dazzle Rome with a church, he chose to build it on the Janiculum — the site traditionally held to be where the apostle had been crucified.

At the start of the 16th century, Julius II insisted on building a new St. Peter’s Basilica atop the old one and paid for much of it with the sale of indulgences. Within a few years, Martin Luther was writing his theses and Lucas Cranach was successfully spreading the anti-Catholic engraving The Papal Ass. In the English-speaking world, anti-papal sentiment spread wildly: to depict a traitor to the nation, he would be shown kissing the pope’s feet. The scholar Andrew Melville, a charismatic figure of the era, relentlessly attacked Catholicism in Latin epigrams full of humor and venom.

Still triumphans, the Church countered the attack with the moral, catechetical, and governmental program formulated at Trent from the mid-17th century onward. And between Nicholas V in the early Renaissance and Alexander VII in a mature Baroque, the pontifical throne completed one of history’s most astonishing trajectories of aesthetics, learning, and power, with Bernini and Pinturicchio, Bramante and Raphael, Castiglione and Allegri, Copernicus and even Juan del Encina under its wings, not to mention — of course — Galileo.

With all their pomp, when speaking of the pontiffs’ role in culture they should be mentioned more as editors, patrons, or benefactors than as stage stars: everyone remembers Michelangelo, very few recall Julius II, even though the indulgence dealings also left us the Vatican Museums. In this period, popes who had already been painted by Giotto (Benedict XI, circa 1300) sat for immortality in the brushes of Titian (Paul III), Raphael (Julius II and Leo X) and Caravaggio, whose portrait subject Paul V would ultimately sign his death sentence. The summit is undisputed: Velázquez’s Innocent X of 1650. As they say: troppo vero. Beside it, in the Doria-Pamphilj Gallery, there is a papal bust by Bernini that, by comparison, does not flatter Bernini.

Maurizio Cattelan’s La hora nona, which depicts John Paul II struck down by a meteorite, is intended as an allegory of human suffering, but it was also a blunt provocation

Pius VII still welcomed Canova and promoted excavations at Ostia Antica, but David’s portrait of him (1805) would be significant, after the frivolities of the 18th century, of a time of retrenchment. Pius VI had closed the century as Napoleon’s prisoner, and Pius VII would again be held by the Corsican — in a 19th century marked by the dismantling of the Papal States. Before regarding the loss of the popes’ temporal power as a relief, Pius IX would be the first “prisoner in the Vatican,” in protest at the capture of Rome.

The situation would last until, precisely, the Lateran Pacts, 60 years later. Those decades saw an intellectual rearmament of Catholicism around neo-scholasticism, strong pontificates and an evident archaeological passion in works like Fabiola or Quo vadis?, both later adapted to film.

At the same time, anti-Catholicism outside Spain intensified — with Hypatia and a morbid subgenre of novels full of wicked abbesses and tortured novices — as did anti-clericalism within Spain. That voice would find its loudest champion in Blasco Ibáñez, who nonetheless did not hesitate to devote a novel, The Pope of the Sea, to his near-countryman Pope Luna.

It is striking that Pope Luna should also inspire the major novel of a Catholic traditionalist like Jean Raspail — L’Anneau du pêcheur (The Ring of the Fisherman, 1995) — a volume that shares the prophetic tone that much pontifical-themed literature would have in the 20th and 21st centuries. There are the convert R. H. Benson with his Lord of the World (1907) and the Jesuit Malachi Martin with novels such as Windswept House (1996) and The Final Conclave (1978), all expressive of a Catholicism besieged by the world.

In this small canon of prophecy we can also include a rarity much praised in its day by David Foster Wallace: The Last Western (1974) by Thomas S. Klise, strangely little known in the Spanish-speaking world. And, of course, The Shoes of the Fisherman (1963 and 1968), a bestseller in bookstores and at the box office that seems to anticipate the year a less-expected option was chosen: the Pole Wojtyła.

The rest — novels and films, often films based on novels — tend to emphasize the aesthetic — the rustle of cardinal silks — more than the prophetic. One thinks of Sorrentino’s series The Young Pope (2016), Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons (2000), or Conclave (2024), all engrossed in not particularly deferential uses of the intoxicating “smells and bells” that draw the postmodern to the old faith.

There have also been notorious outrages by some indisputable figures: from André Gide’s The Vatican Cellars (1914) to Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers (1980) or Kingsley Amis’s The Alteration (1976). Irving Stone, with serious intent, novelized the relationship between Julius II and Michelangelo in The Agony and the Ecstasy (1961), which was also a successful film starring Rex Harrison and Charlton Heston. The Cardinal — Henry Morton Robinson’s 1950 novel and Otto Preminger’s 1963 film — manages to be edifying without sacrificing quality. And, of course, the last great Catholic novelist, Graham Greene, must appear on the list: his The Last Word, published in 1988, returns to prophecy and the end times: when a general shoots the last pope, he still asks himself: “And could it be that what this man believed was true?”

As might have been expected, the visual arts have been less accommodating: Maurizio Cattelan’s La hora nona, which depicts John Paul II struck down by a meteorite, is intended as an allegory of human suffering, but it was also a blunt provocation. At least that is how it was perceived in Poland, where a museum official was forced to resign after exhibiting it. Alongside Cattelan, of course, Francis Bacon’s Study after Velázquez’s Innocent X contests primacy of fame — if not of quality, since Bacon’s work is a major achievement of 20th-century art. So much so that painters such as Yan Pei-Ming, Glenn Brown, and Yue Minjun have returned to Bacon and Velázquez in tributes and reinterpretations. Some with more irony, others with more gravity, all have been eager to show how well apostolic succession and artistic continuity can be understood together.

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