"Practically every movie that shows the pope or even a bishop as a character, and in much of western literature of the last 300 or 400 years, these are portrayed as awful figures"
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Novak is throwing a stone at a cultural mirror, and he knows it will crack along familiar lines. By saying "practically every movie" and sweeping in "much of western literature" across "300 or 400 years", he’s not making a careful census; he’s staging an indictment of a dominant storytelling reflex: clerical authority as ready-made villain. The exaggeration is the point. It mimics the way popular culture flattens bishops into stock types - corrupt, conniving, sexually compromised, power-hungry - and asks why that flattening feels so natural to modern audiences.
The subtext is less about defending individual churchmen than defending the plausibility of religious authority in a secular age. Novak, a Catholic public intellectual who spent his career arguing that faith could coexist with liberal democracy and even capitalism, is signaling a deeper grievance: that the cultural gatekeepers of prestige (publishers, studios, critics) treat the Church not as a complicated institution but as a symbol of repression. His phrasing ("even a bishop") hints at a presumption of guilt: mere proximity to hierarchy is enough to cue ominous music.
Context matters: this is post-Enlightenment anticlericalism filtered through modern scandals and cinema’s appetite for melodrama. A pope who wrestles with doctrine doesn’t plot as cleanly as a pope who plots. Novak’s complaint isn’t only that the portrayals are negative; it’s that they’ve become lazy cultural shorthand, a way to signal moral rot without doing narrative work.
The subtext is less about defending individual churchmen than defending the plausibility of religious authority in a secular age. Novak, a Catholic public intellectual who spent his career arguing that faith could coexist with liberal democracy and even capitalism, is signaling a deeper grievance: that the cultural gatekeepers of prestige (publishers, studios, critics) treat the Church not as a complicated institution but as a symbol of repression. His phrasing ("even a bishop") hints at a presumption of guilt: mere proximity to hierarchy is enough to cue ominous music.
Context matters: this is post-Enlightenment anticlericalism filtered through modern scandals and cinema’s appetite for melodrama. A pope who wrestles with doctrine doesn’t plot as cleanly as a pope who plots. Novak’s complaint isn’t only that the portrayals are negative; it’s that they’ve become lazy cultural shorthand, a way to signal moral rot without doing narrative work.
Quote Details
| Topic | Faith |
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