"The Young Pope" and Good Catholic Art

“The Young Pope” will likely appeal to different factions within religious audiences for different reasons, but its existence should be welcomed. At a time when clergy are represented on television as sexually repressed and authoritarian, as in the campy “Asylum” season of “American Horror Story,” “The Young Pope” strikes a more nuanced tone. When the poet Dana Gioia lamented the lack of good new Catholic literature, he noted that most representations of the faith are trite. "Catholic exposé," he wrote, "is now a mainstream literary genre, from the farcical to the tendentious." While Gioia acknowledges that good Catholic writing and art exist it is another thing to be good and visible, or good and noteworthy, within the broader artistic conversation.