fabian s. klinke

The Camp of Catholicism

notes.

The Camp of Catholicism

Source: The Camp of Catholicism, Ro Mooknee, 41:59, uploaded 2026-04-05, playlist index 62.

Ro Mooknee begins with the suspicion that camp has become a convenient defence for bad media. The word once described a flamboyant gay man, at least in her first encounter with it. The video asks what camp names, why it has a queer history, and whether the visual language of Roman Catholicism belongs inside it.

A word with a queer history

Mooknee traces camp to the French verb se camper, meaning to pose in a provocative or exaggerated way. The first English dictionary definition appeared in the 1909 Oxford English Dictionary, where camp was associated with ostentation, theatricality, effeminacy and homosexuality. The video then moves further back, to an 1874 description in the Manchester Courier of a Salford drag ball called the Queen of Camp Ball.

The most useful historical scene is the trial of Fanny Park and Stella Bolton. On 28 April 1870, the two performers appeared in flamboyant dress at the Strand Theatre and were arrested for outraging public decency. The prosecution also charged them with buggery, a charge that proved difficult to establish. Stella was involved with Lord Arthur Clinton, an aristocrat and Liberal politician, whilst Fanny called herself Clinton’s sister-in-law. In a letter to him she described her “campish undertakings” and the trouble they caused her. Mooknee hears the phrase as a private language shared by people who understood the performance.

After a six-day trial, the jury acquitted Park, Bolton and their companions on the main charges. The court treated their drag as part of their theatrical roles, which helped protect the performers outside the stage. Mooknee adds that the prosecution’s inability to prove buggery may have helped widen the law’s later reach over homosexual acts. That last connection appears in the source as a historical claim rather than a fully demonstrated account of legal causation.

Sontag, artifice and the pleasure of excess

Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” gave the word its academic reach. Mooknee presents the essay as a product of the 1960s, when new ideas and challenges to inherited taboos made camp easier to discuss in public. Sontag treated camp as a sensibility independent of gender and sexuality. Queer communities had adopted it because a playful relation to things treated as morally serious could blunt the force of moral indignation from the outside world.

Oscar Wilde supplies the essay’s opening figure. Wilde was a dandy as well as a queer and camp reference point, and dandyism prized exact dress, refined speech and a leisurely independence. Sontag’s camp has the same attention to performance, with a stronger taste for extravagance. It loves artifice, exaggeration and the unnatural. A dress made from three million feathers can be camp because of its excess, although the object alone does not settle the question. Camp includes the feeling and manner that the object produces.

Lady Gaga’s arrival at the 2019 Met Gala makes the distinction clear. Her dress carried the expected excess, yet the sixteen-minute entrance, five dancers with umbrellas, accompanying make-up artist and personal photographer also formed part of the performance. Camp lived in the arrival as much as in the clothes. Sontag’s catalogue ranges from Tiffany lamps and The Enquirer to Swan Lake, Bellini’s operas, 1930s King Kong, La Lupe, 1920s women’s clothes, feather boas, Gaudí’s buildings and Mozart. Cher later became a standard queen of camp.

Sontag separates naive or pure camp from deliberate camp. The Rocky Horror Picture Show knows what it is doing, whilst Tommy Wiseau’s The Room supplies the accidental version. She preferred the second kind because self-conscious camping can flatten the pleasure. Christopher Isherwood adds a division between high and low camp, with ballet and baroque art at one end and drag at the other. Mooknee finds the distinction less stable now that drag includes political, ironic and highly formal practices. The labels remain useful as descriptions of emphasis rather than fixed ranks.

That distinction also keeps the term from becoming a soft landing for work that has failed. Mooknee uses Ryan Murphy’s All’s Fair as the example. The show tries to be excessive, yet the result appears flat and mediocre. Murphy prefers “baroque” and describes camp as clumsy, accidental and difficult to ignore. He also objects to the way people attach camp to queer art as a lazy catchall, since the label can make a gay artist’s ambition seem niche. A melodrama by a straight man might receive a more serious description.

Kitsch supplies a related boundary. The video treats kitsch as mass-produced, sentimental and tacky, whilst camp depends on performance, theatricality and irony. The two can meet, and Mooknee’s collection of Smiskis becomes her own small example of the problem. A 1970s Webster’s definition joins banality, mediocrity, artifice and ostentation to an appeal so extreme that it becomes amusing or perversely sophisticated. Camp remains a judgement about how an object behaves in culture, rather than a material category.

Sontag’s claim that camp is disengaged or apolitical has produced its own argument. The art historian David Carrier treats camp as subversive and political. Moe Meyer calls it queer parody and accuses Sontag of separating the sensibility from the queer culture that produced it. Sontag still allowed for historical change: time can turn an ordinary object into camp when its own fantasies become strange enough to see. Jennet Conant’s version keeps queerness at the margins. RuPaul’s Drag Race has become mainstream, which changes the conditions under which its camp can work.

The video tests the category against Donald Trump’s golden toilets and towers. Andrew Bolton, the Met curator, called Trump a camp figure. Mooknee sees vulgarity and unintended excess, whilst camp requires a relation of seriousness, irony or performance. Someone can produce camp within a system that supports homophobia and the status quo. The person has to take the object seriously in order to transform that seriousness through artifice. Camp can sit beside conservatism, and its presence says nothing by itself about the politics of the institution producing it.

Catholic excess and the Protestant comparison

Mooknee’s Catholic turn begins with a personal scene. In 2022 she attended the UK March for Life in London as a journalist. The crowd was mostly Catholic, and the visual culture made the question concrete: Roman Catholicism is lavish, and its solemnity often arrives dressed for an audience.

The video compares Roman Catholicism with Protestantism because the Reformation gives the aesthetic difference a historical cause. Martin Luther’s 95 theses appeared in the Holy Roman Empire in 1517. Henry VIII broke with Rome in 1534 and established the Church of England after the Pope refused his divorce. Catholicism retained a Pope as both spiritual leader and worldwide diplomatic figure, understood as the successor to Saint Peter. Protestantism became an umbrella for many denominations without one shared leader.

Mooknee also lists the practices that shape the split in the video: Catholic holidays such as Pentecost, All Saints’ Day and Lent; Purgatory; rosary beads; confession through a priest; a longer Bible and more sacraments; and monastic life. Protestant ministers can marry in many denominations, and women can serve as priests, pastors or ministers in several of them. The comparison is a broad orientation rather than a complete account of either tradition.

The Reformation also challenged Catholic material excess. Luther treated religious imagery as idolatrous, and Calvinists discouraged images of God. Catholic doctrine gives visual elements a place inside liturgical worship, where removing them can appear as a failure to respect God. The video quotes the Catholic catechism’s claim that people made in God’s image express their relation to the creator through the beauty of their artistic works. A Catholic website called “Stripping Away the Cult of the Ugly” and a Vatican criticism of modern churches that resemble museums supply the argument’s contemporary edges. Mooknee’s own position is clear: a Catholic church should look recognisably Catholic, with mystery and grandeur intact.

This sensibility reaches beyond architecture. Mooknee remembers receiving rose-scented rosary beads as a child and using them as something to smell rather than pray with. She contrasts the old Latin hymns of Catholic worship with the Christian rock and pop common in Evangelical churches. Cathedrals were built before the printing press and widespread literacy, so stained glass and sculpture carried stories of Jesus’s birth, life, death and resurrection. Monarchs funded them whilst displaying wealth, political power and religious devotion.

The geography matters as well. The video reports that 41 percent of Catholics lived in Latin America in 2022 and that Italy had seventeen voting cardinals at the 2025 conclave. These figures are presented without full citations in the video itself. Mooknee uses them to explain why the Vatican and Italian history shape the visual impression of Catholicism, whilst acknowledging that extravagance depends on the observer’s background. An English visitor from a Church of England setting may find a Catholic cathedral overwhelming. Someone raised in a Greek Orthodox church may regard it as restrained.

The cathedral makes the worshipper small and God large. Art historian Elizabeth Lev describes the buildings as the material expression of a Christian desire to touch heaven and join the material world to the spiritual. The experience combines sight, sound and smell. The Eucharist intensifies the same relation between symbol and material form: Catholics understand the bread and wine as the living presence of Jesus, rather than only as signs of him. Mooknee jokes about Sunday cannibalism, then leaves room for Catholics who find the joke offensive. Her own framing is that she is making fun with Catholics, rather than treating the religion’s believers as the target.

The question of irony follows. If camp needs irony, does the institution have to intend the joke? Traditional Catholic robes, lace, crowns, jewellery, incense and ceremony can look like drag whilst remaining serious religious practice. A subscriber quoted in the video calls traditional Catholic ceremonies “the definition of camp”. Mooknee accepts the tension: queer identity and camp remain related without becoming identical, and Catholicism can produce camp through an aesthetic devoted to tradition and social conservatism.

Papal dress and the politics of tradition

Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis give the video two opposing papal styles. Vatican II, held between 1962 and 1965, moved parts of the liturgy from Latin into local languages, turned priests towards the congregation and toned down papal and priestly dress. An anonymous priest quoted by The Guardian describes the church entering the council in gold cloth and watered silk before leaving in cheap blankets and polyester.

Benedict treated beauty as necessary to liturgical practice and revived traditional pieces such as the winter mozzetta, a short cape later discontinued by Francis. He wore lavish garments and red papal loafers, whose colour refers to Christ’s passion and his footsteps. When commentators speculated that his red shoes came from Prada, the Vatican issued the line that the Pope was dressed by Christ. German priest Hans Küng criticised Benedict’s pomp and compared him with Pope Leo X, the Renaissance pope painted by Raphael in fur-trimmed dress.

Francis pursued a stripped-down style and was called the first Protestant Pope. His modernising image also reached the internet. He approved the sainthood of Carlo Acutis, who died of leukaemia at fifteen in 2006 after maintaining a blog about Eucharistic miracles. Acutis became known as God’s influencer and the patron saint of the internet. His image now appears on figurines, rosaries, posters and keychains, with a comic, a virtual-reality experience and an always-on livestream of his tomb joining the more traditional objects. Francis had called the internet a gift from God in 2014. Mooknee includes this tangent to show how his version of Catholicism could absorb modern media without discarding the church’s devotional machinery.

The clothing complicates the assumption that visual extravagance signals gay politics. Mooknee says that gender is constructed whilst clothing still carries assigned gender roles. In the society where she lives, a man in a skirt remains radical. Benedict’s more ornate style therefore looks queer-coded to a contemporary viewer, even though Benedict’s politics were more hostile to gay people than Francis’s. Francis’s “Who am I to judge?” remains a low bar, and the video does not turn him into a gay ally. His gay tailor described the work as faithful and tasteful rather than theatrical costume.

Cardinal Raymond Burke supplies the sharper counterexample. He often chose bombastic clothes whilst describing gay marriage as the work of Satan and attacking the Obama administration over marriage and contraceptive coverage. David Gibson of Fordham University’s Center on Religion and Culture argues that a return to old aesthetics can carry a return to old politics. The robes do not reveal the institution’s ethics by themselves.

The conclave as ritual and fandom

The same visual logic appears in the film Conclave and in the 2025 election that produced Pope Leo XIV, the first American Pope. Mooknee avoids the film’s major plot points and describes its Vatican as an entertaining exaggeration with a plausible sense of Vatican culture and electoral politics. She compares the spectacle to RuPaul’s Drag Race, Gossip Girl and Mean Girls, with men in dresses performing for an audience.

The real conclave carries its own theatre. Black smoke tells the public that the cardinals have failed to choose a Pope, whilst white smoke announces a successful election. The longest conclave began in 1268 and lasted more than a thousand days. Gregory X responded in 1274 by requiring future conclaves to happen behind closed doors, with the cardinals isolated from outside contact. Conclave comes from the Latin phrase cum clave, “with a key”, a name that records the locked room as part of the institution’s identity.

Pope Crave began as a fan account for the film and became a parody news account during the real conclave. It then developed into a genuine Vatican news feed with reporting from the ground. Its posts described cardinals as divas, edited images to make them more glamorous and promised the Catholic public a Pope with “drip”. The account even fact-checked Politico. Its satire still carried reverence for the Vatican, and its administrators said that criticism and fascination could exist together. One administrator is Catholic and lesbian, and she posted a critical statement about Pope Leo after the conclave.

An on-the-ground correspondent described the conclave’s secrecy and grandeur as a meeting between RuPaul’s Drag Race and _Survivor with a Catholic child. The joke rests on a serious observation: the ritual’s secrecy presents the decision as weighty. Pope Crave later made a zine to raise money for the Intersex Human Rights Fund, the Freedom Fund, and Librarians and Archivists with Palestine. Its merchandise resembles the Carlo Acutis merchandise in the video. A parody can therefore participate in the same visual economy as the institution it mocks.

Queer attachment and institutional harm

Mooknee calls camp a tender feeling. That tenderness appears in the queer relationship with Catholicism, where admiration, fear and resentment can occupy the same person. A 1997 papal visit to Paris makes the tension almost too visible. John Paul II arrived with 5,000 priests and 500 bishops wearing rainbow-cross vestments designed by Jean-Charles de Castelbajac. The Vatican described the rainbow as Noah’s promise and answered the designer’s observation about gay liberation with the claim that nobody owned a copyright on the rainbow.

The scene is funny because the institution’s visual language collides with the social meaning it rejects. Catholicism is deeply invested in tradition and strict social norms, yet its men wear gold lace and elaborate accessories that would read as gender-atypical elsewhere. The whole institution can look like drag whilst its leaders decide whether gay people may marry in the church or belong there at all.

Kevin Glasgow’s essay “Aesthetics and Camp Catholicism: Thoughts from a Young Gay” gives the conflict a first-person form. Glasgow writes about growing up Catholic as a gay man and admiring Catholic beauty whilst fearing and resenting the church. The 2018 Met exhibition Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination provides his comparison point. Its Vatican-approved display, attended by Cardinal Timothy Dolan, showed how Catholic dress shapes fashion and how fashion borrows Catholic imagery. Glasgow still finds the 2019 camp theme more camp than the explicitly Catholic exhibition, partly because a gala named “Camp” has trouble producing the accidental quality that camp often needs.

His larger point is about exposure to power. The incense, pageantry and physical beauty of the church remain attractive, yet queer camp threatens the institution and the institution threatens queer people. Catholicism can therefore be camp whilst supporting politics that endanger the people who recognise its campness. Mooknee’s conclusion stays with that contradiction. The jokes and the pleasure in the robes do not erase the church’s harm. They identify an irony that the institution’s own visual excess makes impossible to ignore.

Further reading / references

The video description names the following sources and related material. The note preserves the speaker’s use of them; the historical figures, theological claims and statistics above remain claims made or reported in the video unless a source is read directly.

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