Pop culture Pope

MANILA, Philippines - Contrary to what’s been repeatedly broadcasted and tweeted for much of his still young papacy, the Pope is not a rock star. Let’s get that out of the way. Rock stars are creatures of excess, brashness, and vanity. Pope Francis is the antithesis of everything rock stars stand for. His whole image is founded upon humility and the rejection of materialism. He’s the last person one would imagine thrashing a hotel room or ordering a cadre of roadies to arrange his M&Ms according to color.

More importantly, rock stars are among the most conventional and cliché concepts in pop iconography. Pope Francis is a little more indie than that. He’s not an “arena rock” type of Pope — he’s more like an unassuming singer-songwriter, someone rustic like a Jeff Tweedy or a Ryan Adams, or someone harmless like a Bon Iver. In fact, the Pope’s most accurate pop designation can be found in another industry. He’s more appropriately imagined as the modestly handsome, down-to-earth leading man. Pope Francis is a Paul Rudd.

Like Rudd, Pope Francis is popularly known for his alleged subversion of an archetype. He has lowered the image of the dour, almost celestial being portrayed by his predecessors into a friendly and more accessible dude you can hang out and have a selfie with, less a “Holy Father” and more “Holy Fun Uncle,” the same way Rudd has lowered the unrealistic leading men of yore into a regular goofball bro. And like Rudd, the Pope is viewed in some quarters as not a departure from convention at all, that his (relatively) gay-friendly, science-friendly, breastfeeding-in-church-friendly, and let’s-not-get-obsessed-with-contraceptives proclamations are mere reiterations of some of the Catholic Church’s long-standing positions. Rudd, on the other hand, is really just another pretty face.

The point, I guess, is that if we’re treating Pope Francis as some sort of celebrity, we might as well get it right.

VIRAL TOPIC

It’s weird that the leader of the Catholic Church has now become such a part of pop culture — a viral topic, a Rolling Stone magazine cover, a shirt design — but this is where we are. The grand (some might even say “excessive”) preparations for his visit here in the Philippines can be attributed to the country’s hardwired Catholicism, but it is also undeniably due to the fact that he’s such a global superstar. Pope Benedict XVI never had his star power, which is now greater than that of Bono and arguably equal to that of Beyoncé, except that he is slightly more infallible. That he’s beloved even by the secular world will perhaps be his most lasting legacy, unless pop-friendly popes become the norm.

One obvious consequence of this ongoing popification of the papacy is that it makes the Pope, and by extension the entire Catholic Church, subject to fashionability. This, of course, is the reality. Why else has the world been making a big deal about Pope Francis’ seemingly progressive quotes that the clergy has routinely played down, claiming that they’ve already been covered in the Second Vatican Council, and are therefore so 1965? If the Pope truly is, at worst, a mere revivalist, then doesn’t that suggest that the Church is in need of reviving? That, at some point, it digressed from its original intent and reinvented itself? That, like pop culture, it was subject to the spirit of the times all along?

All religions like to think of themselves as fixed and absolute, like the universe in a solid state. They have to think this way in order to justify speaking for a deity that, by definition, is fixed and absolute. But history is filled with evidence to the contrary.

‘BARBARIC’ RELIGIONS

Christianity used to be the barbaric religion, an excuse for burning people alive just for being weird and imprisoning Galileo Galilei willy-nilly. The Islamic world, on the other hand, used to be the zenith of civilization. They already knew for centuries that the earth wasn’t static as Ptolemy had claimed, way before Galileo figured that stuff out. They had indoor plumbing and street lighting and lived peacefully among Jews while medieval Christian Europeans were dropping like flies from a plague that they blamed on Jews and not on their disgusting pigsty lifestyles. Fast forward to today, when large swaths of the Internet are convinced that Islam is inherently barbaric (eye roll).

The truth is that religion is fluid. It is as much a reflection of its followers as it is of its supposedly rigid scriptures. It evolves with its believers, and therefore has constantly changed with the times. Pope Francis happens to be the leader of the most dominant religion of the western world at a time when it is more connected than it has ever been in its history, when every gesture, every word, every innocuous picture taken with random students immediately spreads worldwide. He is a part of pop culture by default, by simply being a publicly vocal religious leader in the 21st century. That his image is now being commodified is not some historical anomaly, or a break from Catholic tradition — it is consistent with its history. The Church has always been a product of its time. It is not exempt from dialectics and trends.

If anything, the Catholic pope as a pop phenomenon is long overdue. I guess this is why we still call him a “rock star” — a term as antiquated as “MTV,” which was last relevant during all those times when the Catholic Church was still regarded as slightly medieval. But times have changed. Pope Francis is no rock star. He is our Manic Pixie Dream Boy.

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