EPISODE 839: THE NORMAN LEAR OF THE CHURCH
AKA The One About Decency
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
Hi and welcome back to Pop Culture Spirit Wow, the Substack that dares to ask, How can I meet Cynthia Nixon, because I’m pretty sure she really is that wonderful? (She’s one of my favorite parts of The Gilded Age, which I write about below. I’m also very slowly working my way through Sex and the City, and while I don’t know that I am a Samantha, I wish I were, because I love her so much.)
It feels like we’re in that strange liminal moment just before the world pauses to do the holidays where just about anything can happen, and at the same time somehow nothing can happen because we’re all too busy either being busy or preparing to do so. I’d say it’s a magical time, but like the above holiday-themed-I-guess? window on 5th Avenue, the magic is maybe a little more chaotic than fairy dust and angels.
And so’s the news. Speaking of…
THE WOWND UP
Legendary TV creator Norman Lear died. *sigh*
Known for his capacity to translate major social questions into compelling, thoughtful (and very funny) television, Lear was still producing shows meant to make the world a more accepting place right up until the end, including a show about a gay, bullied teenager who joins the Marines and a trans woman trying to work through a difficult relationship with her father.
It’s been tremendous reading both newspaper columns about him and seeing some friends online who got the chance to meet him talking about those moments. (I highly recommend this piece by his One Day at a Time-remake collaborators Mike Royce and Gloria Calderón Kellett. They have a story about working with him that’s really special.)
It seems like everyone who ever met Norman was really touched by the experience. It sort of reminds of the way that people talk about meeting Pope Francis. I almost want to say Lear was like the Pope Francis of TV. But really, it’s more like Pope Francis is the Norman Lear of the Church, isn’t it?
Meanwhile, Doctor Who has introduced a tremendous trans character for the first time in its history. Yasmin Finney, who is also just killing it on Heartstopper, plays the Doctor’s BFF Donna’s daughter Rose. Her identity plays into the resolution of the episode: because she’s non-binary, she has a sense of possibilities and options that the male-presenting Doctor simply can’t. It’s a wonderfully empowering take on being trans. Showrunner Russell T. Davies says she’ll also be back, which is great news.
Elsewhere, the New York Times is reporting that goldfish are destroying the Great Lakes. Now you might think, Really, how much damage can a couple goldfish do?
Yeah…it turns out if you put goldfish in a bigger body of water, they just keep eating and growing. Sort of like me with Trader Joe’s dark chocolate peanut butter cups.
(That photo…the stuff of nightmares.)
OPEN MOUTH, INSERT YOUR LETTER OF RESIGNATION
The other big news this week is that the University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill and the chairman of the Penn board both resigned after she and the presidents of Harvard and MIT at a congressional hearing on antisemitism on campus refused to say that calling for genocide on a college campus is a very bad thing and to be denounced.
Once again: *sigh*
Some are arguing that these presidents were trying to make a bigger point about free speech: Of course they’re not in favor of such hateful statements themselves, but they also believe that by its nature a college community can prosecute and interrogate such points of view. We don’t need to be afraid of words or ideas, is the argument, because as a thriving intellectual community we can take those words and ideas down.
The thing is, if you’re a member of a group whose identity is being talked about like this, these are not academic matters. They are upsetting and frightening. Like, lock your doors and don’t go out kinds of frightening. Because who can tell whether these are just words or not? The persons saying it might not themselves be attempting to incite violence (although that’s also such a convenient cover…), and yet there are so many examples of exactly that happening.
Historically, the Catholic Church often plays the same game. A bishop can condemn queer people, or demean trans people, or go online and mobilize his supporter to attack Catholics who try to offer really the most basic kinds of support for queer Catholics, and say they’re just defending the truth. But those words have actual impacts. They make queer people feel threatened and ashamed. And they encourage others to see them as shameful or not really human, which leads to bullying and attacks.
This is my problem in a nutshell with the Vatican’s recent statement on transgender Catholics. Even as it gives transgender people more opportunities in theory, it also very clearly restates a lot of really hateful thinking about transgender people as potentially a source of scandal or harm to others. And no matter how they might think about such things, those words have real emotional and physical consequences for people.
This week I’m going to publish the interview I did with Frank DeBernardo, head of New Ways Ministry, which does advocacy and educational work on the behalf of queer Catholics. He has a pretty different take on the Vatican statement than I do, and some of his comments provide an important corrective to what I wrote about it. The document is in some substantial ways that I didn’t recognize an improvement.
It’s a good conversation about that, and also the Synod and meeting the Pope. I did a tease of it over Thanksgiving. I hope you’ll enjoy it.
AND SPEAKING OF RESIGNATIONS
Friend of the Wow Meredith Lucio sent me this article from Texas Monthly about the Bishop of Fort Worth, Michael Olson, who tried to remove an abbess of a Carmelite convent in his diocese. It’s a story that only gets crazier the more you read.
Just the tip of that iceberg:
The bishop spent two hours questioning Sister Therese while a computer technician collected the reverend mother’s laptop. The next day, April 25, Gerlach had to have her feeding tube replaced in a procedure that required general anesthesia along with the powerful painkiller fentanyl. [The abbess had cancer.] Afterward, the bishop came back to the monastery and insisted on continuing his questioning of her, even though she was weak and groggy from her medication. She felt she had no choice but to comply.
You might think, Wow, what was that abbess accused of doing? It must be pretty bad for them to seize her computer (and also her phone).
She was accused of having had an affair with a priest.
Yep. That’s it. Oh, any by the way, the bishop believed this to be true because the nun’s long-time spiritual director had revealed information to the bishop that she had told him, which was not about having had an affair—she and the priest, who lived far away, had never even met in person—but about being worried that she was becoming too emotionally involved with him, and might be falling in love with him.
So basically, she shared with a man that she trusted that she was having feelings, and so her bishop had her removed from her job and seized her computer and phone.
(By the way, as far as the article reports, nothing happened to the priest. But we knew that, didn’t we?)
There’s also stories of Bishop Olson shouting at other women, intimidating priests into resigning, punishing people he doesn’t like, and generally just being a garbage human.
Pope Francis has forced a couple bishops to resign of late for basically being *******, including most recently Joseph Strickland in Tyler, Texas. I don’t know if he’s taking requests, but Lordy Lord I know some people who have one.
You wonder, why do churches appoint bishops for life in the first place? In what other lines of work are you not subject to terms and regular job evaluations? Even CEOs have boards that they answer to.
Also, can someone please fire that spiritual director? Because seriously, WTF.
No One Mourns the Wicked, Baby.
THIS IS YOUR WEEKLY REMINDER THAT ROBERT SEAN LEONARD IS DOING TREMENDOUS WORK
In more hopeful news, are you watching The Gilded Age? Created by Julian Fellowes of Downton Abbey fame, the HBO series gives the Downton treatment to early 20th century New York City. The cast is absolutely overflowing in Broadway stars, including Christine Baranski, Cynthia Nixon, Kelli O’Hara, Donna Murphy, Audra McDonald, Michael Ceveris, Katie Finneran, Patrick Page, Linda Emond, Nathan Lane, Debra Monk, Laura Bernati, Denée Benton, plus Carrie Coon, Morgan Spector, Louisa Jacobson, and so many others. It’s really a cast of thousands.
I found this season a hard slog at first. (There’s only so much of “rich new money lady wants everything and is never satisfied” that I can take, even if Carrie Coon is a goddess and plays it brilliantly.)
Then they introduced Robert Sean Leonard as an Episcopal minister from Boston who grows to have some nice chemistry with Cynthia Nixon’s spinster character. And there’s something about his performance, a combination of honesty and vulnerability that is absolutely compelling.
Decency is such a hard thing to play. It so easily rolls in moralizing prig, patsy or two-dimensional stand-in for a message or idea that the writers are trying to send. See: Most representations of Jesus or the saints. But Leonard has had a number of roles like this, most especially his long stint as House’s best friend on House, and he somehow makes decency emotionally complex and endlessly interesting. (There’s a scene this season in a church…All I can say is, Find it and enjoy.)
Between that performance and what Sarah Lancashire is doing with Julia Child on Julia, HBO is running (yet another) master class in acting right now. If you need holiday binge watching…
I BET IT’S GOOD THO
The New York Times has an interview with David Byrne. I can’t wait to read it.
MOMENT OF WOW
If you’ve ever seen The Sound of Music, you might have heard that Christopher Plummer’s beautiful moment singing “Edelweiss” was actually dubbed over.
Well recently Plummer’s actual performance was released. And it turns out it’s kind of lovely. Polish is nice, but there’s really nothing so beautiful as someone being real.
Good luck in this strange pre-holiday holiday time. A good time for curling up before a fire or some high quality TV. See you later this week with Frank DeBernardo!
Your columns, writings, pensees are brilliant, insightful, and very, very funny, Jim. Thanks you.