From people selling penance online, to romanticizing priests, to #catholic girl on Depop. There is no denying that Catholicism has effectively become an aesthetic. Playing a part in all this is the use of catholic imagery in pop culture, which has been going on for quite some time. However, with social media, this has been exacerbated.
One could say this was started by Madonna, specifically her Blond Ambition tour of the 1990’s which featured a segment that imitated a sexual act before transitioning directly into a Catholic mass. The Vatican was disgusted. Madonna was the good Catholic girl gone bad. It fed into the male gaze and the desire to watch someone throw away their “virtue” so to speak.
It can be argued that it goes much further back than Madonna. There is the painting “The Sin” by Heinrich Lossow, which displays a Catholic priest and a nun engaging in sexual relations through a grate. The painting was allegedly inspired by the Banquet of Chestnuts, a banquet supposedly held by Cesare Borgia, the illegitimate son of Pope Alexander VI. During this banquet, it is said that Borgia had fifty courtesans in attendance to entertain himself, his sister Lucrezia, and his father. Either way, there is no denying that the Catholic church has long been littered with rumors of illicit sexual activity.
There is the consumerism of it all. Namely selling virtual Catholic penance on Depop.
Depop is an online sale platform where people sell old clothes, shoes that don’t fit and anything fashionable second hand. Some people, though, choose to sell more niche things such as tarot reading or religious rites. In a semi-terrifying semi-brilliant show of entrepreneurship, certain teenage girls have taken to selling the Catholic rite of penance online.
Under one offer of virtual penance were the tags “Dasha Nekrasova, red scare podcast, catholic girl, trad wife aesthetic, fawn, bambi, coquette, Russian, bimbo core, and Slavic girl.” Emphasis on “bimbo core.” This displays how Catholicism has become an odd sort of sex symbol for many young women.
Then of course, I would be remiss not to mention the man only referred to as “Hot Priest” or “The Priest” in the show Fleabag. Hot Priest and the show’s main character, Fleabag, engage in a romantic and later sexual relationship in the show’s second season. At first, the priest tells Fleabag he can never have sex with her. He tells her “I can’t have sex with you because I’ll fall in love with you.” Fleabag breaks the fourth wall, “We’re going to have sex.” Though the pair have a sad end, mainly due to the priest refusing to break his vows. He almost breaks his vows. Almost.
Clearly, Catholicism has a certain pageantry that has proven irresistible to pop culture as we know it. It has shaped and defined and redefined western media since the seventeenth century at the very least. While it is a smaller break off of mainstream Christianity, I would say that there is no other religion that has affected recent media so much as Catholicism. The church and clergy have been glamorized and romanticized to an almost hallowed position in our media and culture.
