Cadaver Synod the Motion Picture

The history of the Papacy is a long and colourful one. Even if you don’t accept the early details of official Catholic history, it goes back nearly two thousand years. There have been scandals, power plays, and actual wars. Popes have shaped and been shaped by the political landscape. There have been great men and petty men, sinners and saints, all sitting on the Chair of St. Peter. It’s a heck of a history to put on the screen. There’s the material for dozens, possibly hundreds, of movies. Hollywood should make plenty of these and fill the screen with drama.

Or so you’d think. There are vanishingly few movies featuring real Popes, and basically none of them are about the Popes in question. There are a handful of Italian made-for-TV biopics, and of course Rodrigo Borgia shows up now and again, both before and after becoming Alexander VI. But that’s it for the stuff focusing on Popes. There’s also The Agony and the Ecstacy, of course, and Alexander III shows up in Becket. But by and large, if a Pope shows up in a movie, he’s fictional.

It’s interesting to think about why. There are movies about fictional Popes, of course. There are even comedies about fictional Popes. But when it comes to history, there’s not a lot. Somehow, it’s considered safe, possibly, to deal with the office and not the men who have held it. (If you’re planning to talk about Pope Joan, that’s fictional, too.) Possibly it’s a fear of offending actual Catholics, who after all are a substantial percentage of the world population. Possibly it’s a leftover fear of the Catholic League of Decency, which led the charge for film censorship in the US in the mid-twentieth century.

Honestly, the Hays Code probably explains a lot of why there weren’t a ton of Papal biopics in those days. Even if your Pope is the good guy in the movie, it’s skirting awfully close to the line of presenting religion in a positive light. Which you were required to do. For most of Papal history, you had the choice of showing religion in a bad light or civil government in a bad light, and under the Code, you weren’t really supposed to do either. There’s no good version of the bickering between the Holy Roman Order and the Papacy, and imagine trying to explain anti-Popes in those days.

Since then, it’s probably partially inertia. Biopics are usually in these days people the general audience has already heard of, which explains all the Borgia stuff. Sure, there’s a movie wherein BRIAN BLESSED plays Pius II, but from what I can tell the focus is on a young Rodrigo Borgia at his first conclave. Manu Fullola is less well known in the US, at least, but Rodrigo Borgia is the best-known historical Pope. What, we’re going to get butts in the seats with a John XVIII movie?

You’ll note that we’ve stuck to the far past for our history. This isn’t getting into twentieth century Popes at all, though there is one movie about the relationship between the Church and the camps, the need to get the Church to denounce them. There’s a lot of scandal in the last century, but let’s not get into that. That would definitely lead to Catholic uproar, even though a lot of Catholics agree about the blame the Church holds for certain things. But man, there are so many cool stories from the Middle Ages and before, and that’s an excuse for a period piece. Why not go there?