Opinion
Featured Image
 Denis Makarenko / Shutterstock

(LifeSiteNews) — “Madonna,” the popular cult icon of sexualized blasphemy, has returned to the news with a series of AI-generated images.

“Feels Good to Be Seen…” was her message posted alongside the faked scenes, which presented an ageless Madonna pictured in sacrilegious poses, including several with Pope Francis.

Others have been unkind about how the 66 year-old Madonna has reinvented her face with surgery. She has now left her real face behind completely, reimagined in these pictures as a mischievous waif reprising a 30-year routine of attention-seeking insults to the Catholic faith in which she was raised.

We have long heard that to appear as Madonna does, and at the age she is, is to witness a sort of liberationist symbol. This is how Madonna likes to sell herself. She is a product, after all, and she needs a sales pitch in order that people keep buying.

Alongside “shocking” images, which are rather trite in themselves, she claims to be a champion of womanhood against “ageism and misogyny.” This is the blurb which is set beside her performance art, in the same way that long and high-minded explanations sit beside the display of a urinal or an unmade bed in an art gallery.

This should not be taken seriously, as it is merely a way of selling something. If we do consider how Madonna’s example has liberated women, we should first begin by noting she has liberated herself from dignity.

For over 30 years Madonna has presented female liberation in the reduction of women to sex objects, which previous waves of feminism despised.

Now in her 60s, she has transfigured herself with successive plastic surgeries whilst railing against age discrimination.

What Madonna exemplifies is the terror of death in the faithless. This is expressed in a desperate quest to retain the appearance of youth. Plastic surgery does remove the evidence of aging, but it replaces your face with a sort of parody of itself.

READ: Ancient Catholic prophecies warn of a pope who will gravely harm the Church

This too is a kind of liberation, but it is arguably more unkind than the ravages of time in its effects.

Madonna looks rather frightful in reality, as her face is no longer entirely real.

The old adage that fame is a mask that eats into the face comes to mind when we consider the products of mass culture who refuse to accept their limited shelf life. In the end there seems to be little more than the mask that is left. That, and the slogans attached to market it. It is an empty box, gilded with spectacular effects – an invitation into a void.

Madonna is a monument of sorts, a relic of a mass culture despite her “toxic” irrelevance to young girls, who have newer cultural products like Taylor Swift to idolize in place of the “desperate” and “embarrassing” professional controversialist. Even her fans now say Madonna is “cringe.

It is aging homosexual men who appear to be her most loyal disciples. Like them, she is a hypersexualized parody of femininity.

She claims that the first man to tell her she was beautiful was her homosexual ballet teacher, whom she met at high school. He died of AIDS in 1990. This is related in a 2022 piece which celebrates Madonna as “the ultimate LGBTQ icon.”

She went on to advocate for the homosexualization of the Boy Scouts of America – whilst presenting an award to American news homosexualist Anderson Cooper in 2013.

The Boy Scouts later issued a statement in support of “LGBTQ” scout leaders and members, following a policy change promoted by the conservative Mitt Romney since 1994. She is also vehemently anti-Trump, and described Kamala Harris as “an intelligent, compassionate, well spoken leader who stands for justice and equal rights for all people.”

Nothing new

Despite the apparent novelty of Madonna she is herself a recycled trope. Cycles of reinvention and blasphemous, occult-shaded signals were a staple of David Bowie’s career. Like him, she dabbled in Kabbalah, and like him “pretends to be queer” in order to be interesting.

What this is ultimately about is doing whatever gets people’s attention. Madonna is like a firework in a combat zone – her detonations fading rapidly into a background morass of explosive sensation and depravity.

A ‘cafeteria Catholic’?

Francis is arguably more scandalous than Madonna. Perhaps this is why she spoke well of him. She said of Francis in 2015, when aged 57: “Rules are for fools. That’s why I like the new pope. He seems very open-minded.”

Madonna Louise Ciccone was raised Catholic in Michigan, and went on to blend Catholic imagery with obscene displays onstage and in music videos seen by millions. She explained this marketing strategy in comments recorded later in 2015:

“Catholicism feels like my alma mater. It’s the school I used to go to, and I can go back any time I want and take whatever I want from it.”

Her latest gallery of images sees her appear as if at prayer, in a white veil, with seven drops of blood painted on her face in a reference to the Seven Sorrows of Our Lady.

In addition, other images generated by an algorithm show her kissing Francis on the cheek whilst staring “provocatively” into the camera. She is got up in what appears to be lace undergarments.

Like the Marquis de Sade before her, Madonna has presented the pursuit of moral degradation and sacrilege as the quest for freedom from restraint. Like de Sade, she has discovered neither satisfaction, nor liberty – but the jaded appetite of the utterly debauched. There is in the end nothing left to profane but yourself.

As Dostoyevsky pointed out in Crime and Punishment, “your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.” For the lost, there is nothing but the mask and the masquerade in the end.

It is important for Catholics to remember that behind the most insulting of masks there is a person with a soul. Madonna has lost her way in trying to find herself. She lost her mother at the age of five, saying this made her “afraid to love.” Instead, she has profaned the image and the name of the Holy Mother of God for most of her adult life.

To find yourself lost is the final destination of all those who seek self-help in self-worship. It is arguably the purpose of the cultural production of meaning by which liberal democracy is ruled to do just this: to steer the souls of men and women away from God and into the bewildering riot of the world, the devil, and the flesh. They exhaust themselves in the pursuit of the horizons of desire, and then they die.

To worship idols such as Madonna is to participate in a secular rite intended to replace the glory and grace of God with a sensational and senseless exaltation. When the record runs out of its groove, all that remains is a listed track among so many others.

We should pray for these celebrities, whose artificial paradise has imprisoned them more completely than any of their fans. There is time yet for Madonna to return to the mother of her soul, her true alma mater, and to repent of the sins she has committed in Her Immaculate Name. Pray for her to the Holy Mother of God that she might come home, after being alone so long.

14 Comments

    Loading...