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TLV — application.
User Name/Nick: Bobby
User DW: n/a
E-mail/Plurk/Discord/PM to a character journal/alternate method of contact:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
crowders / boppy#6969
Other Characters Currently In-Game: n/a
Character Name: Lenny Belardo
Series: The Young Pope
Age: 47
From When?: In canon, Lenny has some sort of nebulous brain-related Problem which puts him into a coma at the end of the season and causes at least two collapses and a nosebleed. For the purposes of the game, I'm going to say that whatever this is actually led to him collapsing and dying just after finding out about Sanchez's death at the end of Episode 6.
Inmate Justification: Lenny had a messed up childhood and still has lots of terribly unresolved issues, which he is trying to resolve by becoming the most powerful man in the Catholic Church and taking out his spite on the faithful. He's vain, stubborn, vindictive, insensitive, and intensely dogmatic, willing to ruin others' lives for the sake of his conservative prejudices. Basically, men will literally become the Pope instead of going to therapy.
Arrival: Against his will.
Abilities/Powers: The Young Pope is technically a mundane canon, but it's also extremely Weird, and thus hard to gauge how much of it is actually within the scope of the story and how much is just pure surrealism. At most, powers-wise, Lenny has prayed to God for miracles and had those miracles answered. Also, one time he said "jump" to a kangaroo and it jumped. So. Make of that what you will. Generally speaking, I don't think this kind of thing will come up in game, since it's totally out of my control as a player. But I would love to play with coincidence if it comes up!
Inmate Information: A note that I kind of wrote this app backwards, so it might make more sense to read the history part first since I gloss over a lot of the canon events in this section that I've described in more detail in the history section.
On Lenny’s first day as Pope, he has a dream that he addresses the crowds of people in St Peter’s Square and tells them they should masturbate more, have more abortions, get gay married and then gay divorced, and generally do everything that the Catholic Church has told them not to do for centuries. This dream is a pretty good guideline to measure Lenny by, in the sense that he believes exactly the opposite: he’s homophobic, anti-abortion, anti-euthanasia, anti-divorce, and generally intent on bringing the Church back to the Dark Ages where everything was sinful and you had to suffer for God’s love.
The question of his faithfulness (or indeed his subscription to religion at all) is unsettled at best, but Lenny is still ruled by conservative Catholic dogma. It informs how he sees the world: it has made him exceedingly intolerant when it comes to questions of homosexuality and abortion, to the extent that he has baselessly equated homosexuality with pedophilia in the past. After meeting the Prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy (a powerful cardinal in Vatican politics) and discerning that he’s gay, Lenny leans over to press the ’panic button’ on his desk to get out of the conversation, and plots to have the Prefect ousted and replaced with someone who better shares his beliefs. In many of his early speeches – to the faithful and to the cardinals – he advocates for a return to outdated Catholic practices, wants to oust all gay men from the clergy, and essentially excommunicate any woman who has ever had an abortion. He considers himself to be absolutely, objectively justified in his beliefs, and will disparage any more liberal members of the church precisely because of their liberal opinions. His intolerance is a shield to him: it means he always has a target.
Lenny was raised in a Catholic orphanage, and upon joining seminary was mentored by an extremely conservative cardinal; he’s developed his own extremely conservative opinions, and is conniving enough to know to keep that to himself, in order to make himself seem less of a threat than his outspoken mentor, until the time is right. That’s how he ends up Pope, at an unprecedentedly young age - his mentor, Cardinal Spencer, is viewed as too conservative, and that makes Lenny the appealing compromise, which he is obviously not. After his election, Lenny immediately starts machiavelli-ing around the Vatican, persuading Don Tommaso to break the seal of confession and tell Lenny everything that is confessed to him in confidence. He’s cruel from the outset, demanding a Cherry Coke Zero for breakfast and refusing to eat any of the food that was prepared for him, and delivering an extremely unprompted verbal beat-down to the comely elderly nun who’d kissed him on the cheek and called him ‘my sweet’, making her cry. Men will literally make old nuns cry instead of going to therapy! This cruelty comes up a lot, when Lenny’s feeling sour or he’s just had a bad day: when a Sri Lankan nun living in the Vatican loses her sister and is crying over the coffin, Lenny coldly commands her to stop crying, and repeatedly tells her that she doesn’t believe in God because she’s upset by her sister’s passing.
Lenny is exceedingly vain. One time he said he was ‘more handsome than Jesus’, and knows that his appearance is an asset that he can use when he needs, which is part of the reason why he hides his face from the masses after his election. In his own words, he loves himself more than he loves his neighbour, more than God. He even literally says, ‘I am the Lord omnipotent,’ which is a bit much, even for a God complex. He likes the drama and excess of the Church, and wants to return to that – he demands the return of the papal tiara and won’t address the cardinals until he has it, and then he has people carry him into the room on a throne like he’s some sort of Byzantine emperor. He surrounds himself with people who fawn over him – Sister Mary, who calls him a saint; Esther, the wife of a Swiss Guard, who is clearly in love with him to some degree; and Gutierrez, who adores him.
He’s stubborn as all hell, digging his feet in on something when he doesn’t get what he wants, and is perpetually about five minutes away from throwing a very refined tantrum. At the beginning of his papacy, he offers Cardinal Spencer a high-ranking position so they can work together, but Spencer refuses him, resentful that he will now never be Pope and blaming Lenny for the opportunity he’s lost. Later, when Spencer comes to his senses and realises that he needs to be in Lenny’s inner circle to stop him from literally destroying the Church by pushing away the believers, Lenny stubbornly refuses him, despite the fact that Spencer’s assistance would be invaluable.
He’s not an entirely horrible person. Deep down, Lenny is terribly insecure, rocked by the abandonment of his parents. He’s been forever altered by what happened to him when he was young, that feeling of being unwanted sticking to him like glue, and his whole life he’s been trying to make sense of why his parents left him, why he wasn’t good enough. But he’s also confident enough in himself that his negative emotions tend to twist up inside him until he becomes resentful that they’re there at all, and wants to make everyone else experience them too. His plan for the Church as a whole is to create a sense of abandonment and rejection among the faithful; it is this abandonment that brought Lenny to God as a child, and he believes that recreating that feeling in the faithful will bring them closer to God in turn. He’ll do anything to make that happen, he just hasn’t realised that he doesn’t need to make people suffer the way he suffered to bring them closer to God. He also feels that by pushing everyone away, he might believe in God again, since his own faith is rocky and unmoored at best. Sometimes he doesn’t believe at all, but when he does he’s marred by a kind of personal disgruntlement with God, who he believes to be indifferent.
Path to Redemption: How do you solve a problem like Lenny? He’s been sheltered from the real world his whole life, and then given a position of immense power where everyone has to do what he says and literally kiss his ring, so you can imagine he has a lot of Problems with narcissism that need to be knocked down a peg or two. Outside of the Vatican, Lenny will be extremely unsettled by his surroundings and the others on the Barge, likely to become verbally hostile (but not physically; he has absolutely no talent for physical fights and would crumple instantly) and lash out against people with snippy little retorts that cut to the quick. He’ll need some tough love pretty quickly to get him over this initial reaction, after putting aside his very first instinct, which is that this whole thing is some sort of prophetic dream.
His major pitfalls, and possible triggers for change, are as follows:
1. His dogmatism, conservatism and intolerant political beliefs. He needs to get over these, full stop. They’re extremely damaging, and in the position of power he has, he’s capable of directly hurting people if he enforces his beliefs, as demonstrated with the death of Angelo Sanchez. The best way to unlearn these is simply to live with other people from various different backgrounds, to hear the stories of people he otherwise never would have met, and to learn that the complexities of human nature aren’t as bad a thing as he may have thought.
2. His unbridled vanity, stubbornness, and God complex, which combine to make him think he knows better than anyone else what’s best for everyone else. This is going to take time to lose, though Lenny’s sometimes halfway there. He’s capable of humility, especially regarding the ‘miracles’ he’s performed in the past, which he’s extremely bashful about and doesn’t like discussing. He really just needs to be humbled. A lot.
3. His resentment of his parents for abandoning him, which taints everything he knows and has damaged his faith in God. For positive progress to be made, he needs to move forward from his parents, or at least deal with the abandonment in a productive way instead of letting it inform everything about how he acts and thinks.
4. One major specific: his indirect responsibility for Angelo Sanchez’s suicide. Acknowledging his role in the suicide, however indirect, is likely to push a lot of things into place for him, it’s just that it’s going to take some time for him to share the story (or any of the other stories about terrible things he’s done, like getting Don Tommaso to break the seal of confession, chastising the faithful in his homily, and insisting on a closed and intolerant church in his address to the cardinals).
He’s going to be a pretty hard nut to crack, and will need a warden who doesn’t pull punches but who is capable of actually understanding him to get to the root of his problems. He won’t react well to wardens who are vocally non-religious, but as long as they’re not outright intolerant of his religion to his face then he’ll tolerate them in turn, though he probably believes he’ll be perfectly within his rights to shittalk behind their back. The ideal warden for Lenny would be able to give him a firm touch while making it seem like a gentle one; he needs to be led without knowing he’s being led.
History: Lenny was abandoned at a Catholic orphanage when he was 7 by his hippy parents. He arrived at the orphanage with a smoking pipe that had belonged to his father, and was welcomed by Sister Mary, a nun, who became something of a mother figure to him over the years. Also at the orphanage was Andrew Dussolier, a boy of Lenny’s age, who became Lenny’s closest friend. He and Andrew escaped the orphanage and ran off together, ostensibly to try and find Lenny’s parents, but Andrew stopped and decided to go back while Lenny continued. Later that same day, Lenny returned himself because he decided he’d rather stay with Andrew at the orphanage.
When Lenny was 14, Sister Mary took him and Andrew to visit their friend Billy, the son of the orphanage’s custodian. Billy’s mother was terminally ill and dying, and though Lenny was at first terrified of going in to see her, he asked to pray by her body. He held up his hands and prayed directly to God, addressing Him directly and saying, “Lord, we must talk about Billy’s mother now. We must talk, You and I, and no one else can hear.” He prayed fervently and in silence, and when he had finished Billy’s mother got up, healed of her illness. Sister Mary and Andrew, who witnessed the event, were convinced it was a miracle.
After Lenny had finished school but before he’d started seminary – a decision he made because no other options presented themselves, and not because he received a calling from God – he spent a week in California, where he met his one and only very short-term girlfriend. He no longer even remembers her name, but he managed to catch her attention by juggling for her, and remembers her for the rest of his life, writing her verbose and personal love letters that he never sent. Under Monsignor Spencer (later Cardinal Spencer), his conservative-leaning mentor, Lenny flourished in the Catholic Church’s hierarchy, elected as Archbishop of New York at an unprecedentedly young age, and eventually becoming a cardinal himself at just 42.
Upon the death of the previous Pope, the Vatican’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Angelo Voiello, engineers the vote for a new pope in Conclave to avoid the election of Cardinal Spencer, who he views as too conservative. Voiello believes that Lenny, as his young protégé, will be easier to manipulate than Spencer himself, and Lenny is subsequently elected Pope. He chooses the name Pius XIII, and quickly establishes himself as independent and singleminded, not as easily manipulated as Voiello had hoped. Lenny quickly recruits the Vatican’s confessor Don Tommaso to tell him the sins of all the others in the Vatican, thereby forcing him to break the sacrosanct seal of confession. In his conversations with Don Tommaso, Lenny admits that he does not believe in God, but quickly claims he was just joking when Tommaso, horrified, questions him about it.
Lenny invites Sister Mary to the Vatican, establishing her as his personal secretary. He refuses to allow images of himself to be marketed or even taken, and refuses to show his face in public: his first homily to the masses is made so that only his silhouette is visible, and all subsequent addresses from the balcony to St Peter’s Square are made with his back to the people. After his first homily, where he chastises the faithful and tells them that everyone must make closeness to God above all else a priority no matter the consequences, Voiello is desperate to mire Lenny in scandal and eventually replace him with another pope. Lenny develops a close friendship with Esther, the sterile wife of a commander of the Swiss Guard (who is also sterile), and Voiello blackmails her by threatening to reveal her affair with another priest. He tells her that she must seduce Lenny, so that compromising pictures can be taken of him and thus secure his resignation.
Lenny also begins to grow closer to Monsignor Gutierrez, a Spanish priest who has never left the Vatican, with whom Lenny shows his softer side. Lenny is entranced by Gutierrez’s description of his calling to become a priest, and they regularly walk around the Sistine Chapel and the Vatican gardens together. Lenny tells Gutierrez that he wants him to investigate Archbishop Kurtwell, an American priest who has been accused of child abuse in New York.
Lenny resists Esther’s attempts to seduce him, but helps her pray to the Virgin Mary for assistance in conceiving a child, and when he is walking late at night and sees Esther and her husband having sex in their home, he gets to his knees and prays for them, demanding for the Virgin Mary to help Esther become pregnant.
Esther does indeed become pregnant, and makes a final advance on Lenny by lifting his hand and touching her breast with it, which is secretly photographed by Voiello. Lenny resists her once again by telling her that all priests are cowards who became priests because they are terrified of loving other people. Voiello overhears Lenny’s words to Esther and is significantly impacted by it, and guilt drives him to hand over the photographs to Sister Mary. Lenny finds out about the attempted blackmail that Voiello engineered, and Voiello apologises to him, but Lenny is unmerciful. The papal tiara, which was on loan to Washington D.C., is returned to the Vatican, and Lenny dresses to the nines in the most ridiculous outfit the world has ever known (yes, that is the actual music from the actual show, they really did that) to finally address the cardinals, who he instructs to close themselves off in order to make the Catholic Church as untouchable and inflexible as possible. He then forces all the cardinals to kiss his feet in supplication.
Six months later, Esther has given birth to a son, who she and her husband have named Pius after Lenny’s papal name. Voiello warns Lenny that the church is losing followers, but Lenny is unconcerned, believing that the mystery he generates with his existence will eventually draw people back. He grants an audience to the Prime Minister of Italy, who rejects Lenny’s laundry list of demands including outlawing common law marriages and gay marriages, granting tax cuts to the Catholic Church, and prohibition of abortion, divorce, and euthanasia in all cases. Lenny and the Prime Minister fail to come to an agreement, because Lenny threatens that he could time his first public appearance to captivate people around the world with his image, and at the same time issue the ‘non expedit’ which is an instruction to Italian Catholics not to vote in Italian elections, thereby significantly reducing the Prime Minister’s voting majority in the next election.
An elderly cardinal dies, and Lenny replaces him with Gutierrez. Meanwhile, Lenny’s childhood friend Andrew Dussolier, now a cardinal too, is forced to reject prospective seminarians if they don’t adhere to clerical celibacy, regardless of sexuality. He is present when one such young seminarian, Angelo Sanchez, is rejected. Sanchez confronts Dussolier at a restaurant; he consoles him, but the young man is too distraught that his one wish in life has been taken away from him, and commits suicide in St Peter’s Square.
Sample Network Entry: TDM thread
Sample RP: TDM toplevel
Special Notes: I have an opt-out on my journal for anyone who'd like to avoid any of the unsavoury aspects of Lenny's character, or who doesn't want to interact with him at all. I understand that many of his prejudices are real-world problems that have directly harmed people and I really don't want to make people uncomfortable or trigger them. I just want to make it clear that his prejudices are of the type that can be unlearned: later in canon, he demonstrates the ability to become much more open-minded, so it's definitely in his character to change, he just isn't there yet at the point I've taken him from, for the sake of the most satisfying character development in-game.
User DW: n/a
E-mail/Plurk/Discord/PM to a character journal/alternate method of contact:
Other Characters Currently In-Game: n/a
Character Name: Lenny Belardo
Series: The Young Pope
Age: 47
From When?: In canon, Lenny has some sort of nebulous brain-related Problem which puts him into a coma at the end of the season and causes at least two collapses and a nosebleed. For the purposes of the game, I'm going to say that whatever this is actually led to him collapsing and dying just after finding out about Sanchez's death at the end of Episode 6.
Inmate Justification: Lenny had a messed up childhood and still has lots of terribly unresolved issues, which he is trying to resolve by becoming the most powerful man in the Catholic Church and taking out his spite on the faithful. He's vain, stubborn, vindictive, insensitive, and intensely dogmatic, willing to ruin others' lives for the sake of his conservative prejudices. Basically, men will literally become the Pope instead of going to therapy.
Arrival: Against his will.
Abilities/Powers: The Young Pope is technically a mundane canon, but it's also extremely Weird, and thus hard to gauge how much of it is actually within the scope of the story and how much is just pure surrealism. At most, powers-wise, Lenny has prayed to God for miracles and had those miracles answered. Also, one time he said "jump" to a kangaroo and it jumped. So. Make of that what you will. Generally speaking, I don't think this kind of thing will come up in game, since it's totally out of my control as a player. But I would love to play with coincidence if it comes up!
Inmate Information: A note that I kind of wrote this app backwards, so it might make more sense to read the history part first since I gloss over a lot of the canon events in this section that I've described in more detail in the history section.
On Lenny’s first day as Pope, he has a dream that he addresses the crowds of people in St Peter’s Square and tells them they should masturbate more, have more abortions, get gay married and then gay divorced, and generally do everything that the Catholic Church has told them not to do for centuries. This dream is a pretty good guideline to measure Lenny by, in the sense that he believes exactly the opposite: he’s homophobic, anti-abortion, anti-euthanasia, anti-divorce, and generally intent on bringing the Church back to the Dark Ages where everything was sinful and you had to suffer for God’s love.
The question of his faithfulness (or indeed his subscription to religion at all) is unsettled at best, but Lenny is still ruled by conservative Catholic dogma. It informs how he sees the world: it has made him exceedingly intolerant when it comes to questions of homosexuality and abortion, to the extent that he has baselessly equated homosexuality with pedophilia in the past. After meeting the Prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy (a powerful cardinal in Vatican politics) and discerning that he’s gay, Lenny leans over to press the ’panic button’ on his desk to get out of the conversation, and plots to have the Prefect ousted and replaced with someone who better shares his beliefs. In many of his early speeches – to the faithful and to the cardinals – he advocates for a return to outdated Catholic practices, wants to oust all gay men from the clergy, and essentially excommunicate any woman who has ever had an abortion. He considers himself to be absolutely, objectively justified in his beliefs, and will disparage any more liberal members of the church precisely because of their liberal opinions. His intolerance is a shield to him: it means he always has a target.
Lenny was raised in a Catholic orphanage, and upon joining seminary was mentored by an extremely conservative cardinal; he’s developed his own extremely conservative opinions, and is conniving enough to know to keep that to himself, in order to make himself seem less of a threat than his outspoken mentor, until the time is right. That’s how he ends up Pope, at an unprecedentedly young age - his mentor, Cardinal Spencer, is viewed as too conservative, and that makes Lenny the appealing compromise, which he is obviously not. After his election, Lenny immediately starts machiavelli-ing around the Vatican, persuading Don Tommaso to break the seal of confession and tell Lenny everything that is confessed to him in confidence. He’s cruel from the outset, demanding a Cherry Coke Zero for breakfast and refusing to eat any of the food that was prepared for him, and delivering an extremely unprompted verbal beat-down to the comely elderly nun who’d kissed him on the cheek and called him ‘my sweet’, making her cry. Men will literally make old nuns cry instead of going to therapy! This cruelty comes up a lot, when Lenny’s feeling sour or he’s just had a bad day: when a Sri Lankan nun living in the Vatican loses her sister and is crying over the coffin, Lenny coldly commands her to stop crying, and repeatedly tells her that she doesn’t believe in God because she’s upset by her sister’s passing.
Lenny is exceedingly vain. One time he said he was ‘more handsome than Jesus’, and knows that his appearance is an asset that he can use when he needs, which is part of the reason why he hides his face from the masses after his election. In his own words, he loves himself more than he loves his neighbour, more than God. He even literally says, ‘I am the Lord omnipotent,’ which is a bit much, even for a God complex. He likes the drama and excess of the Church, and wants to return to that – he demands the return of the papal tiara and won’t address the cardinals until he has it, and then he has people carry him into the room on a throne like he’s some sort of Byzantine emperor. He surrounds himself with people who fawn over him – Sister Mary, who calls him a saint; Esther, the wife of a Swiss Guard, who is clearly in love with him to some degree; and Gutierrez, who adores him.
He’s stubborn as all hell, digging his feet in on something when he doesn’t get what he wants, and is perpetually about five minutes away from throwing a very refined tantrum. At the beginning of his papacy, he offers Cardinal Spencer a high-ranking position so they can work together, but Spencer refuses him, resentful that he will now never be Pope and blaming Lenny for the opportunity he’s lost. Later, when Spencer comes to his senses and realises that he needs to be in Lenny’s inner circle to stop him from literally destroying the Church by pushing away the believers, Lenny stubbornly refuses him, despite the fact that Spencer’s assistance would be invaluable.
He’s not an entirely horrible person. Deep down, Lenny is terribly insecure, rocked by the abandonment of his parents. He’s been forever altered by what happened to him when he was young, that feeling of being unwanted sticking to him like glue, and his whole life he’s been trying to make sense of why his parents left him, why he wasn’t good enough. But he’s also confident enough in himself that his negative emotions tend to twist up inside him until he becomes resentful that they’re there at all, and wants to make everyone else experience them too. His plan for the Church as a whole is to create a sense of abandonment and rejection among the faithful; it is this abandonment that brought Lenny to God as a child, and he believes that recreating that feeling in the faithful will bring them closer to God in turn. He’ll do anything to make that happen, he just hasn’t realised that he doesn’t need to make people suffer the way he suffered to bring them closer to God. He also feels that by pushing everyone away, he might believe in God again, since his own faith is rocky and unmoored at best. Sometimes he doesn’t believe at all, but when he does he’s marred by a kind of personal disgruntlement with God, who he believes to be indifferent.
Path to Redemption: How do you solve a problem like Lenny? He’s been sheltered from the real world his whole life, and then given a position of immense power where everyone has to do what he says and literally kiss his ring, so you can imagine he has a lot of Problems with narcissism that need to be knocked down a peg or two. Outside of the Vatican, Lenny will be extremely unsettled by his surroundings and the others on the Barge, likely to become verbally hostile (but not physically; he has absolutely no talent for physical fights and would crumple instantly) and lash out against people with snippy little retorts that cut to the quick. He’ll need some tough love pretty quickly to get him over this initial reaction, after putting aside his very first instinct, which is that this whole thing is some sort of prophetic dream.
His major pitfalls, and possible triggers for change, are as follows:
1. His dogmatism, conservatism and intolerant political beliefs. He needs to get over these, full stop. They’re extremely damaging, and in the position of power he has, he’s capable of directly hurting people if he enforces his beliefs, as demonstrated with the death of Angelo Sanchez. The best way to unlearn these is simply to live with other people from various different backgrounds, to hear the stories of people he otherwise never would have met, and to learn that the complexities of human nature aren’t as bad a thing as he may have thought.
2. His unbridled vanity, stubbornness, and God complex, which combine to make him think he knows better than anyone else what’s best for everyone else. This is going to take time to lose, though Lenny’s sometimes halfway there. He’s capable of humility, especially regarding the ‘miracles’ he’s performed in the past, which he’s extremely bashful about and doesn’t like discussing. He really just needs to be humbled. A lot.
3. His resentment of his parents for abandoning him, which taints everything he knows and has damaged his faith in God. For positive progress to be made, he needs to move forward from his parents, or at least deal with the abandonment in a productive way instead of letting it inform everything about how he acts and thinks.
4. One major specific: his indirect responsibility for Angelo Sanchez’s suicide. Acknowledging his role in the suicide, however indirect, is likely to push a lot of things into place for him, it’s just that it’s going to take some time for him to share the story (or any of the other stories about terrible things he’s done, like getting Don Tommaso to break the seal of confession, chastising the faithful in his homily, and insisting on a closed and intolerant church in his address to the cardinals).
He’s going to be a pretty hard nut to crack, and will need a warden who doesn’t pull punches but who is capable of actually understanding him to get to the root of his problems. He won’t react well to wardens who are vocally non-religious, but as long as they’re not outright intolerant of his religion to his face then he’ll tolerate them in turn, though he probably believes he’ll be perfectly within his rights to shittalk behind their back. The ideal warden for Lenny would be able to give him a firm touch while making it seem like a gentle one; he needs to be led without knowing he’s being led.
History: Lenny was abandoned at a Catholic orphanage when he was 7 by his hippy parents. He arrived at the orphanage with a smoking pipe that had belonged to his father, and was welcomed by Sister Mary, a nun, who became something of a mother figure to him over the years. Also at the orphanage was Andrew Dussolier, a boy of Lenny’s age, who became Lenny’s closest friend. He and Andrew escaped the orphanage and ran off together, ostensibly to try and find Lenny’s parents, but Andrew stopped and decided to go back while Lenny continued. Later that same day, Lenny returned himself because he decided he’d rather stay with Andrew at the orphanage.
When Lenny was 14, Sister Mary took him and Andrew to visit their friend Billy, the son of the orphanage’s custodian. Billy’s mother was terminally ill and dying, and though Lenny was at first terrified of going in to see her, he asked to pray by her body. He held up his hands and prayed directly to God, addressing Him directly and saying, “Lord, we must talk about Billy’s mother now. We must talk, You and I, and no one else can hear.” He prayed fervently and in silence, and when he had finished Billy’s mother got up, healed of her illness. Sister Mary and Andrew, who witnessed the event, were convinced it was a miracle.
After Lenny had finished school but before he’d started seminary – a decision he made because no other options presented themselves, and not because he received a calling from God – he spent a week in California, where he met his one and only very short-term girlfriend. He no longer even remembers her name, but he managed to catch her attention by juggling for her, and remembers her for the rest of his life, writing her verbose and personal love letters that he never sent. Under Monsignor Spencer (later Cardinal Spencer), his conservative-leaning mentor, Lenny flourished in the Catholic Church’s hierarchy, elected as Archbishop of New York at an unprecedentedly young age, and eventually becoming a cardinal himself at just 42.
Upon the death of the previous Pope, the Vatican’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Angelo Voiello, engineers the vote for a new pope in Conclave to avoid the election of Cardinal Spencer, who he views as too conservative. Voiello believes that Lenny, as his young protégé, will be easier to manipulate than Spencer himself, and Lenny is subsequently elected Pope. He chooses the name Pius XIII, and quickly establishes himself as independent and singleminded, not as easily manipulated as Voiello had hoped. Lenny quickly recruits the Vatican’s confessor Don Tommaso to tell him the sins of all the others in the Vatican, thereby forcing him to break the sacrosanct seal of confession. In his conversations with Don Tommaso, Lenny admits that he does not believe in God, but quickly claims he was just joking when Tommaso, horrified, questions him about it.
Lenny invites Sister Mary to the Vatican, establishing her as his personal secretary. He refuses to allow images of himself to be marketed or even taken, and refuses to show his face in public: his first homily to the masses is made so that only his silhouette is visible, and all subsequent addresses from the balcony to St Peter’s Square are made with his back to the people. After his first homily, where he chastises the faithful and tells them that everyone must make closeness to God above all else a priority no matter the consequences, Voiello is desperate to mire Lenny in scandal and eventually replace him with another pope. Lenny develops a close friendship with Esther, the sterile wife of a commander of the Swiss Guard (who is also sterile), and Voiello blackmails her by threatening to reveal her affair with another priest. He tells her that she must seduce Lenny, so that compromising pictures can be taken of him and thus secure his resignation.
Lenny also begins to grow closer to Monsignor Gutierrez, a Spanish priest who has never left the Vatican, with whom Lenny shows his softer side. Lenny is entranced by Gutierrez’s description of his calling to become a priest, and they regularly walk around the Sistine Chapel and the Vatican gardens together. Lenny tells Gutierrez that he wants him to investigate Archbishop Kurtwell, an American priest who has been accused of child abuse in New York.
Lenny resists Esther’s attempts to seduce him, but helps her pray to the Virgin Mary for assistance in conceiving a child, and when he is walking late at night and sees Esther and her husband having sex in their home, he gets to his knees and prays for them, demanding for the Virgin Mary to help Esther become pregnant.
Esther does indeed become pregnant, and makes a final advance on Lenny by lifting his hand and touching her breast with it, which is secretly photographed by Voiello. Lenny resists her once again by telling her that all priests are cowards who became priests because they are terrified of loving other people. Voiello overhears Lenny’s words to Esther and is significantly impacted by it, and guilt drives him to hand over the photographs to Sister Mary. Lenny finds out about the attempted blackmail that Voiello engineered, and Voiello apologises to him, but Lenny is unmerciful. The papal tiara, which was on loan to Washington D.C., is returned to the Vatican, and Lenny dresses to the nines in the most ridiculous outfit the world has ever known (yes, that is the actual music from the actual show, they really did that) to finally address the cardinals, who he instructs to close themselves off in order to make the Catholic Church as untouchable and inflexible as possible. He then forces all the cardinals to kiss his feet in supplication.
Six months later, Esther has given birth to a son, who she and her husband have named Pius after Lenny’s papal name. Voiello warns Lenny that the church is losing followers, but Lenny is unconcerned, believing that the mystery he generates with his existence will eventually draw people back. He grants an audience to the Prime Minister of Italy, who rejects Lenny’s laundry list of demands including outlawing common law marriages and gay marriages, granting tax cuts to the Catholic Church, and prohibition of abortion, divorce, and euthanasia in all cases. Lenny and the Prime Minister fail to come to an agreement, because Lenny threatens that he could time his first public appearance to captivate people around the world with his image, and at the same time issue the ‘non expedit’ which is an instruction to Italian Catholics not to vote in Italian elections, thereby significantly reducing the Prime Minister’s voting majority in the next election.
An elderly cardinal dies, and Lenny replaces him with Gutierrez. Meanwhile, Lenny’s childhood friend Andrew Dussolier, now a cardinal too, is forced to reject prospective seminarians if they don’t adhere to clerical celibacy, regardless of sexuality. He is present when one such young seminarian, Angelo Sanchez, is rejected. Sanchez confronts Dussolier at a restaurant; he consoles him, but the young man is too distraught that his one wish in life has been taken away from him, and commits suicide in St Peter’s Square.
Sample Network Entry: TDM thread
Sample RP: TDM toplevel
Special Notes: I have an opt-out on my journal for anyone who'd like to avoid any of the unsavoury aspects of Lenny's character, or who doesn't want to interact with him at all. I understand that many of his prejudices are real-world problems that have directly harmed people and I really don't want to make people uncomfortable or trigger them. I just want to make it clear that his prejudices are of the type that can be unlearned: later in canon, he demonstrates the ability to become much more open-minded, so it's definitely in his character to change, he just isn't there yet at the point I've taken him from, for the sake of the most satisfying character development in-game.