Posted on 04/27/2011 8:10:30 AM PDT by Alex Murphy
(RNS) In its new Sunday night series, The Borgias, Showtime has found the magic combination for ultimate crowd appeal in a scintillating soap opera about a bad-boy pope.
The Borgias follows the quasi-historic story of the Spanish noble family who, with the ascent of Rodrigo Borgia as Pope Alexander VI in 1492, brought a nighttime-television-style era of debauchery to the papacy.
The Borgias were infamous for simony — buying and selling church offices and sacraments. In their case, they bought the papacy through bribery and coercion.
But don’t forget the sexual promiscuity, bribery, double-crossing, incest, blackmail, murder, poisoning and all manner of unabashedly sinful behavior.
The debut episodes of The Borgias on Sunday (April 3) opened with scenes of intrigue and titillation. Called to the death bed of Pope Innocent VII, Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia (Jeremy Irons) plots to become the next pope by any means necessary.
Meanwhile, his eldest son Cesare (Francois Arnaud) — an 18-year-old bishop of the church — and his fetching paramour engage in an athletic sexual encounter while his adolescent sister Lucretia (Holliday Grainger) watches through an open window.
Some viewers likely went scrambling to Wikipedia to look up the Borgias during those opening scenes, curious about these cardinals (and popes) who had lovers and children. According to the series, Borgia had numerous children by several mistresses; Pope Innocent VIII fathered a dozen offspring as well. In the 15th century, at least according to The Borgias, it was commonplace for Catholic clerics to have mistresses and large families despite their vows of celibacy.
At a time when stories of clergy sex abuse still regularly make international news, naughty popes and Catholic leaders behaving badly might strike a certain resonance with viewers, if fueled by nothing more than a sense of schadenfreude.
As the debut episodes unfold, Rodrigo buys his way to the throne of St. Peter; a cardinal is poisoned at a lavish dinner with other princes of the church; another cardinal is framed for murdering a chambermaid in his bed; and a traitorous assassin is paid to do the Borgia family’s dirty work.
But wait, there’s more: the new pope uses a tunnel from the Vatican to the villa of the murdered cardinal for regular rolls in the hay with his new mistress; his old mistress, meanwhile, promises to remain chaste now that the father of her children occupies the papal throne.
In short, the papacy has rarely looked worse than it does in The Borgias. And maybe that’s part of its appeal.
Not surprisingly, the arrival of the tawdry papal soap opera in the middle of Lent did not go unnoticed by the New York-based Catholic League, the perennial defenders of any and all perceived pop culture assaults directed at the Catholic Church.
In recent statements, Catholic League president Bill Donohue questioned why Vatican officials hadn’t formally protested The Borgias.
“For one thing, Catholics are used to being slammed by Hollywood, so The Borgias hardly shakes them,” Donohue said. “Catholics don’t expect perfection from (their) clergy. This, however, is beside the point. The most immediate issue is why Showtime decided to gift Catholics with this series during the Lenten season.”
An obvious answer is that this is the high season for all things spiritual. During Lent — with its fasting, abstaining, ashes, rituals and holy days — religion is a hot topic.
The Catholic Church is an evergreen for pop culture clashes. There’s something about Catholicism that seems to lend itself so well to film and television and capture the popular imagination with a kind of passion that, say, Presbyterianism or Lutheranism don’t.
“Well, for one thing it’s colorful — literally. All those cassocks and albs and miters and vestments makes for visually arresting television,” said the Rev. James Martin, a Catholic priest and prolific author of titles such as A Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything.
“It’s the combination of power, money, religion, sex and sin. That’s almost unbeatable television, even if it’s not altogether historically accurate.”
Catholicism has that certain something that makes it well suited to vivid (and sometimes controversial) media depictions, said Tom Beaudoin, associate professor of theology at Fordham University.
“Catholicism offers an unusually compelling mix of qualities that is well-suited for media culture: its taste for the ritually spectacular, its evident culture of secrecy, its elicitation and denial of erotic and homoerotic experience, its historic enmeshment with secular power,” Beaudoin said.
“As everyone now knows, this is a tradition both beautiful and dangerous and that makes for compelling media today.”
Beyond all the high church hedonism, there seems to be something else that keeps viewers tuning in to a can’t-look-away car crash like The Borgias. Maybe it’s really all about us, and not them.
“There’s a fascination with the sins of the powerful, whether it’s Henry VIII or the Borgias,” Martin said. “It may make viewers feel that our sins aren’t so bad: we sin from time to time, but at least we’re not poisoning our relatives.”
Come on, don't you believe that Jesus Christ is God, not a creature, not inferior to God.?
Really? for He died for our sins and was resurrected from the dead.? This is directly in the Bible -- Christ died, was buried and rose from the dead. you do believe that, right?
Well said. I'm not Catholic, but I understand that an attack on the Catholic Church is an attack on all Christians.
I mean to say, it's pretty obvious that Jesus died, was buried and rose from the dead. It's in scripture, in all the Gospels, and repeated in Acts and the Epistles. What proof do you need for this?
Let the Scriptures speak. In what Scriptures is Christ said to be equal to his heavenly Father,
In what Scriptures is Christ said to be inferior to heavenly his Father?
You say this or that is in the Scriptures, so show me! That’s all I asked and if you cannot, well then, so be it.
That’s called being “noble minded”. (Acts 17:11)
Ok, so do you believe that Jesus Christ is Lord, God and Savior?
Do you believe that Jesus Christ rose from the dead?
Sigh... John 10:30 30 I and the Father are one.”, John 5:18 18 For this reason they tried all the more to kill him; not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God.
Jesus Christ was not a creature, He was not a created being
Do you believe that Jesus Christ was a created being, not God?
Come on, isn't that enough proof for you that He was not a created being?
Hell is real. You do believe that, right?
In John 10: 30 Jesus says, “I and the Father are one”, “one” in what sense? Jesus explains that it is unity in thought and purpose at John 17:11, he prays that his followers be one with him in same fashion as he is one with “the Father”.
So when at John 10:30 Jesus used the the term “are one” he was speaking of being one in purpose. (John 10:38)
You quote John 5:18, “John 5:18 18 For this reason they tried all the more to kill him; not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God.”
But it was Jesus’ ENEMIES that equated calling “God his own father” with “making himself equal with God”.
Just as at John 10:31-39, when Jesus’ enemies wanted to stone him for their false accusations.
I believe what can be clearly demonstrated to be a teaching of the Scriptures. If you assert,
“Jesus Christ was not a creature, He was not a created being”,
Then show me from the Scriptures.
.
“Hell is real. You do believe that, right?”
“Hell” or the Greek “Hades” is real and I’ve written about it more than once.
But as you wrote:
“According to Scripture, if one is in hell, “he shall be tormented with fire and sulfur . . . the smoke of their torment ascends forever and ever, and day and night they have no rest” (Rev. 14:11).”
This verse has nothing to do with hell (hades).
Before going further please define who is meant by the first instance of “God” here in John 1:1-3.
And the second.......and the third.
Yea but ya need to paint and clean up the mess Rome has left there..
... back when it was called The Tudors ...
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