Pope Fiction:
De-Stigmatizing the Papacy

The old saying goes that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. American media types, being a remarkably historically illiterate people, are forever "discovering" old heresies and stale anti-Catholic chestnuts every few years and presenting them with a flourish under the naïve impression that this "shocking new revelation" is the definitive blow against an outdated Faith. However, it never occurs to such people to ask how such a Faith has lasted so long as to be so continually and frequently outdated. And so, every Christmas and Easter, Time, Newsweek and PBS run stories on the "search for the historical Jesus" and present us with the electrifying new theory (never before presented!) that Jesus was really just a wise teacher, or the first Marxist, or a mere enthusiast, or that he never existed. And, of course, he never ever intended to found a Church, particularly the Catholic Church (which is, of course, nothing but an immense superstructure of conniving prelates that has utterly obscured Jesus' small and simple message that we should be nice to each other and support public television).

One would think that after enough of these repetitive revelations about the "true Jesus" and the Awful Truth about the Catholic Church, someone would ask how an institution like the Church has managed to convince so many intelligent people that it is the Church Jesus founded. But such questions never arise in a media community endowed with the historical memory of a fruit fly. And so we continue to be treated to the hoot-inviting spectacle of films like Stigmata.

Stigmata is arguably the dumbest anti-Catholic screed ever committed to celluloid (which is saying a lot). It manages to combine rationalist sneers about Catholic belief in the supernatural with twaddle about demonic possession being transmitted by Rosaries and (surprise! surprise!) alleges a Huge Vatican Conspiracy is at the back of it all. It turns out evil Popish hierarchs are involved in a grand and murderous conspiracy to keep the world from discovering-you may want to sit down lest the breathtaking originality of the charge bowl you over-that Jesus never intended to found a hierarchical Church. How do the heroes of the story discover this shocking secret? Why, it turns out there's a manuscript (in Jesus' own handwriting no less) that tells us so. (Don't ask bothersome questions like "How do you identify Jesus' handwriting?". Just have faith.) Naturally, the Pope's minions are out to kill those with the true knowledge and destroy the evidence. Meanwhile, the alleged "spirit of the true Jesus" is acting remarkably demonic and channeling himself through the hapless heroine who is manifesting the stigmata of the title and speaking in a guttural voice a la The Exorcist to tell the world his "authentic message" of enlightened Catholic-bashing. In the end, the film is horse race between adolescent blasphemy and adolescent stupidity that ends in a photo-finish.

Cretinous goo like this can actually make it to #1 at the box office in the United States, an allegedly educated nation. So it is not surprising that the manufacturers of pop culture in Hollywood are quite ready to give us more of it. Thus, the movie rights to the novel Pope Joan by Donna Woolfolk Cross have also been acquired (by the same fine people who gave us The Last Temptation of Christ) and will also soon be gracing the silver screen with further "facts" about the fictional medieval Pope who was actually a woman. And we shall also soon be reading about Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII in yet another straightforward assault on the See of Peter. This book alleges itself to not only document Pius XII's "anti-Semitism, narcissism, and calamitous mix of political and spiritual ambition", but also to show how many of Pius' allegedly pro-Nazi policies are "reasserting themselves today under the reign of John Paul II".

Given this climate of intense hostility to the Pope among the media elite, as well as the large cornucopia of misperceptions about him in ordinary popular culture, it would be handy for Catholics wishing to speak intelligently about their faith to have some resource which responds with charity and clarity to these and many other typical misperceptions about the papacy. Happily, Patrick Madrid thought exactly the same thing and did something about it: he wrote Pope Fiction: Answers to 30 Myths and Misconceptions About the Papacy (Basilica).

Precisely what troubled Madrid in discussing the papacy with different people was the sheer variety of anti-papal ideas he encountered. All these ideas could be answered well and had been many times. But the trouble, says Madrid, "was that when people asked me about this or that question, the information to answer them was always scattered across fifteen different books. A book dealing with Pius XII and the Holocaust is not going to be a book dealing with the biblical evidence that Jesus founded the papal office, which is not going to be a book dealing with the Inquisition, the Pope Joan myth or the papal record with respect to slavery."

So Madrid has distilled twelve years of research, debate, and writing on these and various other questions into a single "one stop shopping" book addressing thirty myths about the office of the Pope in chronological order from Peter to John Paul II. It is a light, breezy and lucid presentation of an impressive array of biblical, historical, philosophical and theological data on the papacy. Questions dealt with range from hoary chestnuts of anti-Catholic polemics (like the white-haired notions behind Stigmata and other bits of agitprop alleging Jesus never intended to found a hierarchical Church or a Petrine office) to the highly questionable charges against Pius XII to more arcane questions surrounding obscure figures like Vigilius, Honorius and Sixtus V.

Pope Fiction is not a whitewash but is rather a remedy for a great deal hogwash about the papacy. It defends only the infallibility-not the niceness or sinlessness-of the Pope (indeed the nastiness of the nasty Popes is faithfully portrayed). But it also disentangles the papacy from a great amount of sheer unhistorical nonsense (such as the Pope Joan myth) and gives readers a useful tool for confronting the many-sided silliness of the media portrayal of the Pope.

This is a great service, for at the end of the 20^th Century, we live in a world in which only the Pope commands respect on a nearly universal scale (except among the media). As increasing numbers of people feel a deep attraction to the Church he shepherds, there are yet many held back from union with it by the very falsehoods and confusions Madrid debunks in Pope Fiction. Catholics who wish to bear witness to the Faith can hardly do better than to read this book and keep it close at hand the next time some book, film, TV show, or magazine article casually asserts another shocking new (and patently false) "revelation" that is as old as the hills of Rome.