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Vincent is a pretty Pope. It's one of the first things the media said about him in the coming days, whether as an insult to his apparent "lack of masculinity" or some sort of ill-fated compliment. We live in a world that, as some scholars have said, has a habit of attributing good morals to those it deems attractive, there are many words people have used to describe this structural issue as it intersects with many other systemic issues, but Vincent thinks the term "lookist" gets the point across well enough. He has known this to be true long before he could ever hope to read such essays in a fourth language. It is ironic to him, no, not ironic, its something more intentional than that, it is irony by design that we should attribute good morals to those we deem attractive, because in all his experiences, it is the devil who is the most beautiful of them all. For all the pomp and pageantry that the western world, especially the Catholic parts, would like to adorn itself in, it could never fool him into thinking it had washed away its ugly past, in fact this pageantry was more symptomatic of it than ever. Christ was more likely to be a leper than he was to be an aryan barbie doll from a Nazi poster , this he knew more than anything else.
So it need not matter what the tabloids intended when they called him the "Pretty Pope", it was simply more proof of his own deception. How he had fooled them all, God included? He wasn't fit to be Pope! He was a disgrace! No matter of paying for that with his own blood would change it! He'd dedicated his life to war, to suffering, to the places where Jesus was actually most likely to be, and now he's here, a pretty pope in a pretty palace, and the fact that he's dedicated his life to suffering is no indictment on his character to you! That he should simultaneously be so self-centred as to think that he, should personally suffer for the good of others whilst also being unable to stop, his suffering pours from his wounds like Christ himself, it's like a metaphysical stigmata! And you won't even chastise him for that because there's nothing more you want to see in the world than a beautiful martyr!
Vincent is obviously not a fan of Swinburne. That much should be apparent. He sighed, setting "The Existence of God" down on his desk. So what if he got angry reading basic theological arguments? He'd never been that much into academics, pretty-boy air-head, he never felt fulfilled arguing for the existence of something he just knew was true, that he could feel, that seemed more real than anything but the suffering he subjected himself to in the field of work. That's why he did it, the world isn't on paper, it's out there, original thought comes from experience, and that is something you often have to go out of your way to get. That being said, on a practical level, despite his pretentious aforementioned reasoning, it was quite hard to move through international and curia politics without academic knowledge, so it couldn't hurt to start over again, especially in English, his seminary work in Spanish was one thing but it wasn't comparable in English per say, something about the philosophical limitations of language, you'd think being multilingual would help in that department, but not for Vincent.
He won't assign any level of sanctity to naivety, because that very quickly leads to the sanctity of ignorance, but that being said, naivety, such as that in children, will often lead to a type of holiness that can't be replicated in adults, he saw it many times in Kabul, and many times he saw it stolen away, the fact that children can drop the naivety so quickly in hard times shows that there is nothing innate about it, but maybe that's why God chose him, because he is still naïve, not ignorant, but warm, soft, naivety. He is like a child when standing next to the rest of the Curia, he will have to confess at the small amount of pride he feels at that, but the point is, he feels reluctant to dive into academics because he doesn't want to relinquish any of that naivety, he knows for a fact that, in the pursuit of knowledge, we have made ourselves more ignorant. You should know that a portion of our biological knowledge is built on the theft of the corpses of the poor. Science is a top-down kind of endeavour, but sitting in the Vatican's gold trimmed palace, he realises that religion is too.
The irony of that is that it only strengthens his faith, humans weren't made to be smart or ignorant, we were meant to be naive in the garden of Eden, but the beautiful tempt us into mimicking God, all the while they hope that you don't notice that their beauty is no sanctity, if the aesthetic argument is true, then the only thing it proves is that the devil is real.
It is not that beauty is a lie, beauty does not mean something good, you were not promised anything, in fact, beauty is a truth you are seeing exactly what you get, evil.
Life must have been hard for Jesus, but not in the way it is for Vincent, but in the way it is for a badly injured dog.
"My God, My God, why have you Forsaken me?" Matthew 27:46.
Even on the cross Jesus was naive. Unable to comprehend. Vincent has often be curious as to what Jesus was actually like psychologically, what did he think of all this? And whether he thought anything at the time, the truth is that through the thousands of years of recorded scripture, he is a man with no feelings, more akin to another kind of animal, a bare-cheeked Eve straight out of Eden, an object.
To go through all that pain, and then question in the end, like a child who cannot grow up when necessary. Jesus did not feel his feelings, he just did what he knew was right, Christians aspire to be that, but would that actually be a good thing? If most met someone who was actually like that, they certainly wouldn't elect them to be Pope. So he must have fooled them. The pretty pretty pope.
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