Pop(e) Culture

'Infallibility' my ass. Also, Happy Pride Month!

This time, a brief post. This is not the Part 2 to my Part 1, but I wanted to get one thing off my chest.

First things first, I’d like to wish a Happy Pride Month to the LGBTQIA+ community all over the world.🌈 May you all be free to be yourselves and love whomever your heart likes best!💖

The Gay Pride is a big deal in Amsterdam. Here's the Westerkerk Tower proudly marking the event. Photo by Angela Compagnone on Unsplash

Ten days ago, the seemingly avuncular Pope Francis used a highly derogatory term for homosexuals. Hard to believe, right? Who would have thought that the head of the Roman Catholic Church – an institution ever so subtly attuned to the changes in social norms and sensibilities – would have uttered such vile words? Oh wait, they are not. In fact, I bet they're nostalgic for the Spanish Inquisition, when they could burn not just books in a big auto-da-fé but – most importantly – people they didn't like, whose sins were to think differently and critically, and to talk and write about it. Those were the days!

The problem in the Catholic Church is not troppa frociaggine (too much faggotry), my dear Frankie-boy. I'm not going to enumerate all those too-much-of-something-rotten things, because I want to keep it short and sweet. But you know what I mean: greed, corruption, the concealment of crimes such as pedophilia, the extermination of hundreds of millions of Indigenous people in the many centuries of colonial expansion, being complacent on fascism, and so on and on, in a gallery of horrors.

Now, I wouldn't go as far as to say that there is at least one pope I don't dislike, but I think that the wondrously named Enea Silvio Bartolomeo Piccolomini – who became Pope Pius II in 1458 – was kind of cool.

He was ordained a priest in 1446, in his early forties, after an eventful life, during which he managed to have various romantic liaisons all over Europe, build his future ecclesiastical and political career, and write comedies, autobiographical Commentaries, and poems, mostly erotic ones. According to a note on his Wikipedia page: "Whenever chided with his past immoral life and writings, he would reply, 'Ignore Aeneas, but listen to Pius.'" What a badass, what a legend!

You can catch a glimpse of his wit from this quatrain, in which he joked about the already common practice of nepotism, another gift Italy gave the world:

Pius in the 15th c.:

Quand'ero solo Enea, / Nessun mi conoscea.

Ora che sono Pio, / Tutti mi chiaman zio!

A literal translation would read like this:

When I was just Aeneas, / Nobody knew me from Adam.

Now that I'm Pius, / Everyone calls me their uncle!

My take in contemporary slangy English:

When Aeneas was my real name, / I had no discernible fame.

Now that I'm Pius the Pope, / Suddenly, I'm this big fucking dope!

Thanks for reading! If you liked this post, you can share it, leave a comment, or buy me a tea. I’d be very grateful to you, I’d appreciate it more than I can express!