It used to be fun to beat up on the Catholic Church. You know, those folks who tell you all about how important it is to follow Jesus?
Quo audito, Iesus ait ei: Adhuc unum tibi deest: omnia quæcumque habes vende, et da pauperibus, et habebis thesaurum in cælo: et veni, sequere me.
That's from the Vulgate version of the Bible, Luke 18, Verse 22.
In God's native language, English, the Vulgate version translates to:
And when Jesus heard this, he said to him: “One thing is still lacking for you. Sell all the things that you have, and give to the poor. And then you will have treasure in heaven. And come, follow me.”
Of course, elsewhere in the Bible, God demonstrated that he's not merely mighty; he can also be witty. His church-builder, Saint Peter, whose name in Latin, Petrus, actually means Rock, provided God with a play on words he evidently couldn't pass up:
Et ego dico tibi, quia tu es Petrus, et super hanc petram aedificabo ecclesiam meam...
and I say to you, who art Rock, and upon this rock I shall build my church.
Clever, don't you think? Tie it together with Matthew 18:18
Amen dico vobis, quæcumque alligaveritis super terram, erunt ligata et in cælo: et quæcumque solveritis super terram, erunt soluta et in cælo.
Amen I say to you, whatever you will have bound on earth, shall be bound also in heaven, and whatever you will have released on earth, shall be released also in heaven.
It took a while - until 1870, to be precise, when the First Vatican Council, under Pope Pius IX, declared that when popes speak ex cathedra, i.e., "from the papal throne," they are infallible. Hypocrisy, meet arrogance.
It's like shooting fish in a barrel to beat up on the Catholic Church these days. The proclaiming of itself as infallible in matters of truth and morality is echoed in the prayer asking God to deliver Jews "from their darkness." In fact, the pope is the director of an institution that is not merely fallible, but chock full of corruption. You don't have to go back to the Crusades or the impetus to the Protestant Reformation that was the sale of indulgences in order to pay for the construction of St. Peter's. In just the past couple of decades we've seen the scandals of the Vatican Bank. Which looks, in retrospect, like just a warm-up to the priest abuse scandals. And which have pretty much shredded the integrity of the church, in the way it put on full display its willingness to put the appearance of propriety ahead of the welfare of catholic children for all the world to see - over and over again in country after country.
But just as I don't want to give up on America because so many of us are willing to give up on democracy, I don't want to reduce the church to its bad apples. I'll grant you that believing that there is a God who built a very fallible human institution called the church on a rock doesn't work for me. There's too much evidence it's built on shifting sand. But at the same time, even though its doctrines leave me cold, I know it provides a whole lot of people a place to put their best intentions. It's a big tent.
Netflix came out this week with a film which many will see as yet more proof of the church's fallibility, in the way it ignores the two most basic pillars of morality, the avoidance of violence and deceit, pillars which non-Christians and Christians alike tend to agree on.
Vatican Girl: the Disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi is a four-part series based on the disappearance of a fifteen-year-old girl who lived with her family inside the Vatican and who was lured away by still unidentified kidnappers on June 22, 1983. Her whereabouts and her fate are unknown to this day.
Vatican Girl is a story very much worth telling. A heartbreaking tale of a girl torn from her family which starts out as a simple kidnapping and ends up a multi-faceted story of international intrigue involving Mehmet Ali Ağca, the guy who got a life sentence for shooting Pope John Paul II, but got out early and now feeds stray dogs and cats in Istanbul, shady mucky-mucks within the Vatican hierarchy, all the popes since JP II, the Vatican Bank, Russia and the KGB, and the Italian Mafia.
Somehow Mark Lewis, who wrote and directed the docuseries, and Chiara Messineo, its producer, managed to get access to Emanuela's brother, Pietro Orlandi, and the journalist Andrea Purgatori, both of whom have devoted much of their lives these past nearly forty years keeping the search going and the story alive. It's a powerful combination of agonizing frustration, as one conspiracy theory after another takes center stage, and fury-making disbelief at how badly such a great story can be butchered. Long before you reach the end of the fourth episode, you're ready to throw a shoe at the TV screen or computer monitor you're watching this slipshod misadventure on. How many times are the shots of people getting into a green car or putting a coin in a payphone recycled? Fifteen? Twenty? Help!
Even if you don't mind being jerked around by one conspiracy theory after another, each one poo-pooed in turn, you will still smart at the fact that the best they can do after all this time is tell you the church is full of secrets.
What do the popes know that they are not telling?
I'm sorry. If you think the church is covering up yet another scandal, you should say so outright. Bash away, if you must. But don't turn this whole thing into a thriller that goes nowhere in the end. And don't suggest that every pope, even Francis, plays the mafia game of omertà (silence) like a pro without more to go on. You make me want to turn in my church-bashing credentials and come to its defense. OK, so you did line up virtually all of the witnesses in the various conspiracy tangents and have them all, one after another, lay the blame on the church. But, as at least one critic has pointed out, this series bears more resemblance to Dan Brown's DaVinci Code than it serves the cause of investigative journalism.
Emanuela's mother appears only at the very end, possibly because the filmmakers didn't want the audience to miss the thrill of the roller-coaster ride by being reminded this is a story about a family's never-ending tragedy.
Vatican Girl is mostly in Italian, with English here and there.
It's not a flop despite its annoying repetitiveness - the series is worth watching for its depiction of life in Rome, аnd for the reminder that the Vatican hierarchy can give master classes in how to play your cards close to your chest.
I give it a C-minus. OK, a C.
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