I consider myself a very Traditional and Catholic Lutheran. I love the Roman Catholic Church, and I hope and pray for the day when the Lutheran Gospel of salvation by grace alone will be sounded in its Cathedrals, and the Church reunited. In any case, in my sojourning outside the Roman Communion, I still enjoy getting glimpses of it and feel a need to keep learning about the church’s Catholic history.
The Tudors was a wonderful show filled with what one of writer called: “ecclesiastical pornography”. It’s ecclesiastical (churchly) pornography in the sense of obscene excess in the shots of magnificent cathedrals and churches, choral arrangements and shrines that simply don’t exist in the common practice of the faith today. Having watched all of the Tudors several times, I felt the need for more visual fantasizing since our own age is so puritanical in its religious accoutrements, and so I started watching “The Borgias”.
With Jeremy Irons as Rodrigo Borgia and newly elected pope, the first episode covers issues of simony, clerical concubinage, and the politics of the late Renaissance / pre-Reformation church. The series far from being an Elizabethan lampooning of Catholicism, shows the mixture of piety and pragmatism of the Borgia family and by no means portrays them as atheists (from what I’ve seen so far).
(Pope Jeremy Irons, absolving his bastard son of rigging the papal elections -by Jeremy Iron’s own command- to get him to St. Peter’s throne)
As a lay theologian, I’ve also found it fascinating how anti-nomian / gracious the Borgias and Christians of late 15th century Rome are portrayed. Constantly the men are committing mortal sins, always with Jeremy Irons assuring them that “God will forgive us”. Since practically everyone in the family (including the Pope’s bastard children) are bishops or priests, and so they can simply treat the conversations of those around them as confessions, and promptly absolve them of their sins. To me, this seemed to be actually admirable in a sense – not the lasciviousness, but the centrality of the forgiveness of sins (the Gospel, in Lutheran theology). The church has always been a whore, as St. Augustine knew, but perhaps if the Borgias had actually been that sure of the gracious forgiveness of sins through God’s Word and absolution, the Reformation wouldn’t have been necessary.