ROME – When director Paolo Sorrentino’s hit series “The Young Pope” Debuting in 2016, it took the Vatican a year to unabashedly bless its imagined and sometimes blasphemous image of the Pope. Not so with Sorrentino’s latest film, “Parthenope,” which received early approval from the Catholic Church in Italy.

This only seemed to reignite interest in the film, leading it to the top of the box office here for Italian films since its theatrical release last month.

Set in Sorrentino’s native Naples, the film is a lush meditation on beauty, love and death, drawn from the Greek myth of the siren Parthenope, who throws herself into the sea after failing to lure Odysseus with her song. Parthenope is closely related to Naples, so the city is sometimes called “Parthenope” and its people “Parthenopei” in Italian.

The film is in no way about the church, but towards the end of the film, there is one scene that would choke any Catholic. It involves a cardinal, the seductive protagonist Parthenope, and the liquefaction of the blood of San Gennaro—the alleged recurring miracle that is a sacred cow to many Neapolitans.

Prominent Italian Catholics have denounced the sacrilegious sex scene as not only demeaning to the faith, but Naples itself, with the Italian bishops’ conference newspaper Avvenire calling the scene’s “sterile aesthetic” “in bad taste”.

In a flurry of backlash, Avvenire said Sorrentino’s fascination with the Catholic Church in “The Young Pope” reached new lows in “Parthenope.”

“The impression is that they are images chosen for the image, either nuns playing tennis or cardinals smoking cigars,” Avvenire concluded.

Monsignor Vincenzo De Gregorio, who oversees the chapel that houses the relic of the blood of San Gennaro and the treasures related to the patron saint of Naples, said he had not seen the film in its entirety, but that clips of the scene were sufficient.

While acknowledging that his comments would only give the film more publicity, De Gregorio told Corriere della Sera that he objected primarily to the film’s “superficial” treatment of one of Naples’ enduring mysteries: how does San Gennaro’s blood liquefy or not. , on three specific days each year.

According to legend, the alleged miracle recalls the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 1631, when the blood of San Gennaro liquefied and the magma from the volcano stopped before entering the city. San Gennaro is today often invoked to protect Neapolitans, and the three-times-a-year ritual attracts thousands of devotees.

“Of course, Sorrentino did not intend to make a documentary or an in-depth, sociological, historical analysis of Naples, but simply to analyze its dreamlike aspect, because that’s basically all,” De Gregorio told Corriere.

Sorrentino, who won an Oscar for his Fellini-esque love letter to Rome, “The Great Beauty”, said that his ode to Naples had to focus on the Parthenope, the sea, and the complicated and sometimes contradictory relationship between them and Naples itself.

“She’s a free woman, very spontaneous, she doesn’t judge, like the city doesn’t judge,” he said at a press conference at the Cannes Film Festival, where “Parthenope” debuted in May to a standing ovation. “She is the mirror of the city where I grew up.”

And some hailed “Parthenope,” the Cannes jury awarding cinematographer Daria d’Antonio the festival’s technical prize. This week, Italian media reported that “I love Sorrentino” and “I love Parthenope” T-shirts and new Christmas nativity figures, for which Neapolitan artisans are famous, featuring one of the film’s characters, have started circulating in Naples.

Sorrentino himself found adoring fans seeking selfies and autographs this week during a special screening of the film in Palermo, Sicily.

It’s the latest brush with recent cinematic attention for Naples, the backdrop for the HBO television series “My Brilliant Friend” based on the best-selling quartet of novels by Elena Ferrante.

Sorrentino’s last feature film, “Hand of God” it was also based in Naples and featured another sacred but secular icon for Neapolitans, Maradona. Before that, he made waves with his 10-episode series The Young Pope, starring Jude Law as an unlikely and controversial pope, followed by The New Pope, starring John Malkovich.

A year after the original HBO and Sky series began airing in Italy in late 2016, Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano has finally given positive reviews, despite what it called the mode “frivolous”, “caustic” and “grotesque” in which he painted the Vatican.

L’Osservatore Romano did not comment on “Parthenope”.

The Vatican is a perennial subject for filmmakers, with a number of films in recent years focusing on the papacy, including Nanni Moretti’s “Habemus Papam,” Netflix’s “The Two Popes” and, most recently, “Conclave,” with Starring Ralph Fiennes.

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