As a lifelong Catholic, I’ve often thought that two of the Church’s chief characteristics are a) how weird it is when you think about it; and b) how weird it is that so few people in it think how weird it is when you think about it. Happily, if a little smugly, I have to say that nothing in the first episode of Inside the Vatican (BBC2, Friday) caused me to revise this theory.
There was a time, of course, when allowing TV cameras to film your institution was a risky strategy, as St Paul’s cathedral and the Royal Opera House can testify after those fly-on-the-wall series of the 1990s showed us their dirty laundry with some glee. These days, though, organisations tend to be a bit more savvy — and, judging from Friday’s programme, none more so than the Catholic Church. Certainly anybody who tuned in hoping for duelling crosiers or the angry slamming down of psalters will have been disappointed. Instead, this was unmistakeably the Church as it would like to be seen, which means that much of the programme’s (considerable) interest lay in realising how differently it would like to be seen now that Pope Francis is in charge. What we watched possibly wouldn’t qualify as woke in the Guardian. Even so, the Church did its best to appear as modern and liberal as any theocratic institution whose buildings, clothing and hierarchy are rooted in the Renaissance could reasonably be. (Full disclosure: as a liberal Catholic myself, this was fine by me.)
The programme began with the Liverpudlian Archbishop Paul Gallagher, the Vatican’s equivalent of foreign secretary, reminding us of the still strange fact that this 100-acre patch of Rome is a sovereign state.
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