Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
At night, the Pope dreams of his parents as they leave him. They’re beautiful young hippies who are receding on a ferry. So, the Young Pope’s parents disappeared into the pleasure-seeking future. Perhaps that accounts for the extent to which he’s eager to retreat into the past, and take the rest of the church with him. Or, as he explains to Tommaso in the next scene after being told that people are gossiping about him spending so much time with Esther, “I intend to start a revolution.”
To be fair, a Pope having sex with a woman would be both revolutionary by modern standards and exactly the kind of thing Popes did constantly 500 years ago.
Approximately five minutes later, the Pope is cupping Esther’s breast in a chapel after she tells him he’s a Saint. He explains to her that he loves God “because it’s so painful to love human beings. I love a God that never leaves me… I renounce my fellow man and fellow woman because I don’t want to suffer.”
Cardinal Voiello is positioned outside with some photographers to photograph the couple. It would seem that Cardinal Voiello has accomplished his scheme to blackmail the Pope out of the church with relative ease, despite the fact that the Pope concludes that “it’s not possible to love you the way you want to be loved, because I’m a coward, like all Priests.”
We then flash back to the Pope’s childhood at the orphanage with Andrew, and his desperation to find him Mom and Dad. Andrew, now Cardinal Dussolier, is at the Vatican and joins the Pope for a midnight chat. They decide to leave the Apostolic Palace to go get cigarettes. Sister Mary panics when she hears her two former charges have disappeared from the Palace, but, when she goes to Cardinal Voiello to tell him he reassures her. He even tells her that they had to retrieve a former Pope from a bingo parlor. Voiello proceeds to tell Sister Mary she’s very beautiful, and then recites the same speech that the Pope gave to Ester to her. Then he tells Sister Mary that he’s not going to destroy the Pope after all. This may be because he thinks the Pope has genuine vision, or just because he has tender feelings towards Sister Mary.
Meanwhile, the Pope and Andrew are hanging at a hotel bar with a very beautiful prostitute whose clients claim she is “proof of the existence of God.” She snaps a photo of the Pope and tells him that, in fact, it’s his eyes that are proof of the existence of God. This is a nice compliment, but this does not seem like an ideal person to possess one of the very few pictures of the purposefully elusive Pope.
Andrew proceeds to tell the Pope that he remembers seeing the Pope’s mother the day she left him, and that her eyes “were bright but impassive.” The Pope claims it causes him too much pain to talk about. Once he returns to the palace, he tells Sister Mary that the only miracle he needs is to see his parents again. Whether that’s to forgive them or chastise them for leaving is unclear, but either way, it seems an extremely human desire.
Cardinal Voiello meets with the Pope to tell him not to send Cardinal Gutierrez to New York to investigate the child abuse case. He tells him that the Cardinal is a fragile alcoholic, and it could send the message that the church is not taking this seriously. The Pope tells Cardinal Voiello that he already knows that, furthermore, he knows that the Cardinal tried to create a non-existent scandal involving him and Esther. He explains that none of Cardinal Voiello’s tricks will work on him because – he seriously says this – “I am the young Pope.”
There follows a fairly fantastic scene of the Pope preparing to address the cardinals as he dresses and dons the Papal tiara to the tune of “I’m Sexy and I Know It.”
Once he is fully attired and speaks to the cardinals, he informs them that from now on “we’re not in, no matter who’s knocking on our door… Tolerance doesn’t live here anymore.” He tells everyone that they will reach out to people no more. They need to return to being inaccessible. It won’t make them popular, but it will make the few who follow them fanatical.
It’s unclear whether the Pope means to do this because of true religious devotion, or simply because he knows it’s a savvy political move. Inaccessibility does breed desirability, though it may not be the best way to promote the teachings of Jesus. Either way, the cardinals fall in line, and fall, literally, to their knees to kiss the Pope’s feet.
The episode ends with the Pope telling Esther he will always forgive her, and Esther sensing that she is pregnant. It’s nice that someone got what they wanted.
The Pope and his cardinals then go to meet with Tonino Pettola, the shepard who has attracted a following for his visions of the Virgin Mary and supposed curative powers. They explain that the reason for the visit is that he “has busted their balls.”
It doesn’t look as though they’ll be leaving as peacefully as the Young Pope’s parents did.
Jennifer Wright is the author of It Ended Badly: 13 of the Worst Break-Ups in History and Get Well Soon: The Worst Plagues in History. Follow her on twitter @JenAshleyWright.
