Vatican offers first reaction to ‘The Young Pope’October 3, 2017 - 13:06 AMT PanARMENIAN.Net - The Vatican newspaper has broken a yearlong silence and weighed in on director Paolo Sorrentino’s “The Young Pope”, giving the series generally positive reviews despite what it called the “frivolous,” “caustic” and “grotesque” way it painted the Vatican, The Associated Press reports. L’Osservatore Romano dedicated a two-page spread in Sunday’s edition to the 10-episode TV series, which began airing in Italy in October 2016 and in North America earlier this year. The main essay was penned by Juan Manuel de Prada, a Spanish intellectual who explored the contradictions – in Sorrentino, in the character of Pope Pius XIII, played by Jude Law, and in the Vatican hierarchy – that were presented by the series. “The Young Pope” opens with the improbable election of Lenny Belardo as history’s first American pope. Despite his youth, Belardo charts a deeply conservative, controversial and at times vicious papacy, still haunted by the trauma of being abandoned by his parents and raised by a nun. The series features Diane Keaton as the nun, Sister Mary, who is convinced Lenny is a saint, and Silvio Orlando as the scheming secretary of state who spars with him. In his review, de Prada found that inside Sorrentino’s anti-clerical rants there was also a “docile admiration for the church.” Sorrentino doesn’t manage to penetrate the church’s mystery “but he manages to convey his own perplexity to the viewer,” de Prada wrote, “who will ask how it’s possible that an institution run by ambitious, lascivious braggarts could survive all these shipwrecks.” The newspaper’s silence during the Italian run was notable, since other Catholic media were almost unanimous in their criticism. L’Osservatore’s editor-in-chief, Gian Maria Vian, said he specifically chose not to enter into the Catholic media debate while the show was airing. “They wanted us to either bless it or excommunicate it, and I didn’t want to play that game,” Vian said in a telephone interview Saturday. “But we intervened now because it’s an important television series, an important cultural phenomenon.” A top L’Osservatore columnist, Lucetta Scaraffia, looked at Sorrentino’s screenplay, which she says has “criticism of the existing church, but in some way hope that something good might come from it.” Top stories The creative crew of the Public TV had chosen 13-year-old Malena as a participant of this year's contest. She called on others to also suspend their accounts over the companies’ failure to tackle hate speech. Penderecki was known for his film scores, including for William Friedkin’s “The Exorcist”, Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining”. The festival made the news public on March 19, saying that “several options are considered in order to preserve its running” Partner news | Kazakhstan welcomes Yerevan, Baku’s agreement to meet in Almaty Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has welcomed the agreement of Baku and Yerevan to hold negotiations in Almaty. Armenia offers to temporarily host, preserve Gaza manuscripts The Armenian Foreign Minister has said Yerevan is ready to help preserve manuscripts from the conflict zone in Gaza. Aliyev says no need for mediators in Armenia-Azerbaijan process Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev believes that Baku and Yerevan do not mediators in the process of normalizing relations. Aram I supports Karekin II’s “patriotic position” Catholicos of the Great House of Cilicia Aram I has expressed support for the Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin. |