Goddess: Inside Madonna (20 page)

When several of the nuns told Madonna that before a girl can take her vows, she has to be modest and uninterested in the opposite sex, Madonna decided that she was perhaps better suited for stardom. As it turned out, she proved that show business and religion are not mutually exclusive.

M
other Dolores belongs to the cloistered order of nuns at the Regina Laudis Convent in Bethlehem, Connecticut, and is one of the few women of the veil who have been in show business. Before Mother Dolores entered Regina Laudis more than thirty-five years ago, she was Dolores Hart, the movie actress who is best remembered for her costarring movie roles in the 1950s with Elvis Presley. Although her sensual looks have faded and her hourglass figure is hidden beneath her flowing habit, even at sixty-five, with her face devoid of makeup and framed by a wimple, she is still breathtakingly beautiful. “It isn’t surprising that she considered becoming either a nun or a movie star,” Mother Dolores explains. “For Madonna and for many other children, a nun is like a movie star. She is dressed in costume and presides over a classroom or a stage. She is mysterious and yet open, remote and at the same time accessible to discuss anything and everything with her young charges. For many Catholic children, nuns are the embodiment of beauty and goodness. As a small child, Madonna was able to see the drama in the Church.”

According to Mother Dolores, it was clear from the beginning that Madonna was not meant to take her vows. “Most people erroneously believe that giving up a secular life to become a nun is filled with torment and misery,” Mother Dolores continues. “That is simply not true. When I decided to leave Hollywood and enter a convent, I was so sure that was where I belonged that never for an instant did I think about what I would be giving up, whether it was sex or makeup or the movies or all the glamorous things that had been part of my life. I understood from the beginning that it was God calling me to serve Him. If Madonna was meant to take her vows, she would have had no doubt that that was her destiny.” Mother Dolores smiles. “You know, there are many different ways to serve God, and Madonna is making many people aware of the Catholic Church and all its teachings who might not have been aware if she didn’t exist. She reaches so many young people who have conflicts with the teachings of the Church that her approach to Catholicism isn’t necessarily negative. Madonna addresses issues in a way that her fans can understand that she has the same dilemmas that they have which correspond to the difficulty of living in today’s world.”

More than any other video, “Oh Father” is an example of the traumas that have touched Madonna the most profoundly: the heartfelt torment when she decides to forgive her father for betraying her, the touching memory of her mother’s death, and her irrepressible sense of travesty. In a brief scene in “Oh Father,” a priest covers a body with a sheet that becomes a field of snow with Madonna sitting in the middle, obviously symbolizing the death of Madonna’s mother. In the video, as the family makes the trip with the body from the funeral parlor to the cemetery, a billboard appears on the side of the road advertising Coca-Cola. The irony of course is that Coke is Pepsi’s major competition, and the controversial video “Like a Prayer” was the basis for the Pepsi commercial subtitled “Make a Wish.” In the five-minute video, set in a church, Madonna is surrounded by religious imagery, including stigmata, burning crosses, an all-black choir, and a statue of a black saint that comes to life when she kisses its feet. The story line also sends a moral message that could have been based on
Mississippi Burning
, a film that came out at about the same time as the video. In “Like a Prayer,” Madonna witnesses the stabbing of a white woman by a gang and the subsequent arrest of an innocent black man (the black saint who becomes a living man after his feet are kissed) for the young woman’s murder. After several minutes of singing and dancing in a field of burning crosses, Madonna decides to report to the police what she has witnessed in an effort to free the black man. Given the clip’s religious, racial, and musical messages mixed in with saints turning into sexual human beings, it is not surprising that Pepsi decided to distance itself from the highly controversial subject matter. Madonna always believed that the executives at Pepsi were less put off by the sacrilegious elements of the video than by the fact that the company was not receiving enough of a plug in the commercial to warrant a boycott of the soft drink by a shocked public. In the end, Pepsi decided to walk away from a signed deal, which cost them Madonna’s $5 million fee.

It wasn’t the first time that a work of art steeped in Catholic iconography resulted in an adverse public reaction. In the 1970s in England, James Kirkoff, who wrote the words to the Stephen Sondheim musical
Into the Woods
, also wrote a poem called “The Love Who Dare Not Speak Its Name.” As a gay man, Kirkoff told the story, drawn from his own fantasies, about a Roman centurion who, while guarding the crucified Christ, becomes sexually aroused. It was not unlike Madonna’s portrayal of her own erotic feelings, in “Like a Prayer,” for the crucified Christ. At the time, Mary Whitehouse, who is still living and continues to head an organization bent on “cleaning up” the contents of television programs, successfully brought a case against Kirkoff for blasphemy. The eventual public outrage against Whitehouse and the court’s reversal of the decision to censure Kirkoff mirrored the numerous letters that Madonna and even the Pepsi company received concerning the latter’s decision to pull the commercial. The general feelings expressed by fans and Pepsi consumers indicated how much they appreciated the video’s message and how they wished they could have found a way to “sort out their own problems when it came to certain aspects of their religion.” In response, Madonna made the following statement: “The video’s message was a social statement in defense of an interracial relationship and an idea I had to promote that kind of joyousness in church.”

Father Gary Siebert has been
the assistant pastor at Holy Cross Church in the heart of Times Square in Manhattan for the past five years. A Jesuit, he has had a varied career as a dancer in a company directed by a disciple of Martha Graham, a professor at John Jay Criminal College, a media consultant for Robert MacNeil of the
MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour
, and also as the priest who tended to Martha Graham spiritually at the end of her life. An attractive and articulate man whose views on the Catholic Church are outspoken and controversial, Father Gary’s positive opinion of Madonna goes back long before he learned that the doyenne of dance admired the singer and before he was aware that Graham identified with Madonna’s approach to the Catholic Church. “Martha, like Madonna, loved the drama in the Catholic Church, and one of her first compositions was about the Madonna. Even more relevant is that Martha always danced to the floor, which she often said was symbolic of the way Catholics drop to their knees to worship. She loved the fact that Madonna always played to the floor, whether she was writhing around or simulating prayer and sex.”

Father Gary Siebert understands how the public could relate to Madonna’s message of fear and oppressiveness in Catholicism, its passion and discipline and obsession with guilt. “What’s sexier than a naked man on a cross?” he asks rhetorically. “Why shouldn’t everyone, not just Madonna, love the crucifix? There you have the near-perfect fantasy, a naked, utterly passive guy who’s not going anywhere. He is literally nailed. ‘Like a Prayer’ should be required viewing in every Catholic church. The truth is that the Church can’t expect people to worship that image without taking at least a smidgen of it into their personal life. Growing up in that kind of strict and unforgiving atmosphere both at home and at school where the smallest act of defiance is considered a sin accounts for Madonna’s obsession with women as either virgins or whores. Madonna is expressing the same ambivalent state of heart, mind, and soul as any other confused Italian Catholic in America. The difference is that Madonna tapped into the conflict that every human being has whether they are Catholic or not, and that is that every one of us constantly suffers from varying degrees of guilt about believing or not believing, feeling sexual pleasure, or just by being alive and having a good time when millions of others we see on the news or read about are suffering and dying.”

Father Gary believes that from the time she was a little girl, Madonna somehow understood that there was little difference within the Church between art and life. “She grasped the drama in the teachings of the nuns at Catholic school,” he explains, “beginning with baptism. When you immerse a baby in water, you’re playing like you’re drowning a baby, life to resurrection. In fact, all the sacraments are borderline experiences, to die with Christ and rise to a new life. Think about the final scene in
Godfather I
when there’s a baptism going on at the same time as a series of brutal Mafia murders.”

Rather than denigrating the Church, Father Gary believes that in all of Madonna’s performances, she celebrates life, which, by definition, includes religion, God, sex, death, and birth. “These are all conditions and experiences that every human being not only can identify with in the abstract but also lives with on a daily basis. Madonna accepts the fact that life is ambiguous, which is the strong point for the Church’s sacramental life.”

While Madonna has been criticized for her explicit sexual fantasies concerning the crucifixion, Father Gary maintains it is only because the current Catholic hierarchy is so out of touch with reality that those in power simply “don’t get it” and are most often offended by the “form rather than the content.” Father Gary explains, “The church has become powerless, and when you render a ritualistic system impotent, it becomes violent, which explains the Church’s approach to gay people and to women. And by that I mean that their approach is quite ruthless and uncompromising because they have to protect what has become a very unpopular position.”

Profoundly influenced by the Church
and by her own disharmony with her religion, Madonna’s music and videos have reflected the decadence that was prevalent during the nineteenth century when many works of art and literature depicted sadomasochistic portrayals of the crucifixion. By using baroque iconography to challenge some of the most revered symbols, Madonna has joined the ranks of those artists who personify Catholic defiance. She, like so many writers and artists, has interpreted the rituals of the Church and the graphic images of the crucifixion to represent a sexual act. Unlike the other artists who have responded to the erotic image of Christ according to their own sexual proclivities and preferences, she has always played with the sexuality of the crucifixion from both sides of the erotic spectrum—homosexual and heterosexual.

William Burroughs, the author of
Naked Lunch
, addressed the fantasy of execution and ejaculation, the hanged man who releases sperm at the moment of death. In a collection of essays entitled
Don Antonio
, Somerset Maugham writes about the painter El Greco. Based on the painter’s style in depicting crucified figures and their suffering—the naked, penetrated man on display—Maugham assumes that he was homosexual and used the crucifixion to paint his own gay sexual fantasies. Oscar Wilde, who was raised in the Irish Catholic Church, eroticized the figure of John the Baptist, the immediate precursor to Christ, in his play
Salomé
. The more holy the figure, the more tempting it is to drag that character down to the carnal level of human sin. Wilde has Salomé dance for King Herod, who, as a reward, offers her anything she wants. The object of her desire is the head of John the Baptist, about which she has fantasized, conjuring up images of his “white skin” and of “biting his lips until they bleed.”

Paul Gambacinni, an American who lives in London, where he is known as Mr. Rock and Roll, has a popular radio program on the BBC. He believes that Madonna’s attitude toward the Catholic Church is not only brave but extremely intelligent. “Having been raised Catholic,” Gambacinni says, “when I first saw ‘Like a Prayer,’ I understood immediately that it was a sincere attempt on her part to work out her feelings in the same way that Scorsese tried to do in
The Last Temptation of Christ
. Both artists are extremely unusual and daring when they address issues that are so very deep and personal through popular entertainment.”

Gambacinni maintains that when Madonna uses Catholic iconography in her art, she is not being gratuitous or frivolous nor is she conjuring up those images solely to cause a sensation. “I am convinced,” Gambacinni said, “that for Madonna, it is a genuine attempt to work out contradictory heartfelt feelings. As a Catholic, I see Madonna as someone who is trying to say that part of this whole Catholic thing is nonsense but it means so much to me.”

The problem, according to Gambacinni, is the subtext within Catholicism that the Church refuses to address and which Madonna has defined in “Like a Prayer,” when she explains the erotic feelings she has for the crucified Christ. “When I first saw it,” Gambacinni says, “I thought, how brave, how fantastic that she could express what we knew all along, that the Church forces us from the time we are children to worship the form of a nearly naked and brutalized man. The Catholic Church refuses to admit that the image in itself is pornographic. You are made to worship the consequence of violence, human hopelessness, and near nudity. I remember my most tender feelings as a teenager when I was still in the Church would be for male friends who had been injured. Compassion poured out of me, the well opened because this was my religious training. I had been taught to anoint the crucified Christ.”

In his opinion, out of one hundred people who have been brought up in an intense Catholic environment, several at least will interpret the crucified image of Christ as having sadomasochistic and erotic undertones. “It’s inevitable,” Gambacinni says, “when children are confronted by that overpowering figure, because it’s physically huge in the Church, it’s obvious that there’s going to be some kind of deviant response. Especially since children have their First Communion at the age that Saint Thomas Aquinas said, ‘Give me a child until he is seven . . .’”