The Young Pope: The Second Coming of Brideshead Revisited?

The series’s lush evocation of a bygone era of English high living was infectious. In New York, Bloomingdale’s unveiled display windows of “Brideshead”-inspired fashions. Young men emulated Sebastian by toting teddy bears they named Aloysius. A New Yorker cartoon depicted a woman introducing a dowdy middle-aged companion: “This is my cousin Sebastian. But, of course, not the Sebastian.”

Or, as Joseph Bottum writes,

The homosexuals loved it. The Catholics loved it. The literary types went gaga over it. The cinephiles praised the filming, the drama critics raved about the casting, and everybody — everybody — in the fall of 1981 seemed to be watching the PBS presentation of ITV’s Brideshead Revisited.

Brideshead was also the rallying cry and inspiration for a whole new kind of youth rebellion—the Young Fogies. There was even a handbook that (half-satirically) taught the youth of the 80’s how to live like the Tories of the 1920’s. The Fogies tried to dress, talk, drink, and think like Charles and Sebastian. Anglo-Catholicism (and Waugh’s own Roman faith) came back into vogue. And Brideshead, though by no means the only cause, was certainly a watershed factor “buttressing” the movement.

A similar phenomenon has accompanied the release of The Young Pope, first in Europe, then in America. Young, traditional Catholics tend to love the show. The gorgeous use of aesthetics drawn from the Church’s artistic and liturgical heritage holds a clear allure for them. But perhaps more fundamentally, the show reads like fanfic for their frustrations in the age of Pope Francis. And those who have taken to social media as part of Catholic Left Irony Twitter are particularly vociferous in their enthusiasm. These young Catholics, often known as “Tradbros,” are largely made up of meme-savvy, Latin-loving, anti-liberal folks who read The Josias and the Tradinista! Manifesto (perhaps not at the same time and in the same company). This is not to say that Catholics of other ages and with other theological and political commitments haven’t also enjoyed the show. But the parallels between the two movements are too evident to resist.

In the last episode of The Young Pope, the titular pontiff tells a French cardinal that “Goodness, unless combined with imagination, runs the risk of being mere exhibitionism.” And, like Brideshead before it, The Young Pope as a series is nothing if not a proof of those words.

Rick Yoder is a fourth-year student at the University of Virginia majoring in Religious Studies. He was received into the Catholic Church on Easter, 2013. He enjoys travel, going to museums, discussing postmodernism, reading the works of Eliot, Yeats, and Crashaw, and occasionally writing fiction and poetry of his own. St. Philip Neri may be his favorite saint. He blogs at The Amish Catholic.