r/CrusaderKings • u/ProfFicus • 10d ago
DLC Spawn of Satan Pope
Tried to roleplay him mostly accurately, but when the court nickname event fired I just couldn't resist.
(The mask is the only one that doesn't clip with the outfit, he got disfigured as a result of a cancer treatment)
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u/AFP2137 10d ago
In a nutshell (sorry this got so long):
Poland used to be a very religious, Catholic country. It still is, but the level of religiosity is nowhere near what it was in the 20th century. The election of John Paul II as pope was probably the most important event of the entire 20th century for Poles who were alive at the time, including regaining independence and both World Wars. Having a Polish pope was simply something absolutely enormous. There are genuinely people who believe that the collapse of the USSR started with John Paul II becoming pope, and honestly, those arguments aren't even completely unfounded. The Pope definitely played a major role in Poland's turn toward the West.
So for Polish Boomers and Gen X, he was the biggest cultural icon, and a genuine cult developed around him. We're talking about thousands of monuments all over Poland, gatherings, collective prayers, and people hanging portraits of the Pope in their homes. I literally had a small bust of the Pope at home, and my parents weren't even particularly religious lol. After the fall of communism in Poland, the Pope became quite literally the most important living Pole.
Unfortunately, as tends to happen when one person is worshipped on such a massive scale, things went a little overboard.
Millennials and older Gen Zs had been hearing since childhood about what an amazing person the Pope was, but it was presented to them mostly as straightforward, mind-numbing propaganda. One important thing to mention: Polish schools have religion classes, but these aren't classes about religious studies, they're Catholic catechism. They are technically voluntary, but when I was in school basically everyone attended them. Because of this, Polish schools were also saturated with love for the Pope. Even in the secular school I attended, we had competitions about our knowledge of the Pope, commemorated the anniversary of his death, watched movies about him, etc.
This was basically a universal experience for anyone who grew up in that era. In other words, wherever a young person went, John Paul II was somehow present in this part of their life.
As you can probably imagine, there is no better way to make young people dislike a particular person than forcing that person's cult on them through older generations.
That said, it's not entirely true that young Poles simply disliked the Pope. Today he probably isn't viewed particularly positively, but that wasn't necessarily the case back then.
Young people simply weren't as blindly devoted to him as older Poles were, who continued to absolutely love him. Then, with the rise of the early internet, people started making memes about the Pope.
Even the most innocent and relatively tasteful jokes were met with such outrage from older people that television started talking about an alleged "campaign against the Pope." If someone was caught saying anything negative about him, it was basically treated as if they deserved a public lynching and should have their Polish citizenship revoked (obviously not literally, but you know what I mean).
Once young people realized just how insanely angry older people got whenever someone insulted the Pope, he became a perfect tool for trolling older people online, as well as a generally edgy topic specifically because it broke a taboo.
And that's how "Czanzopapy" was born, some of the most blasphemous and outrageous memes about John Paul II. He was called the son of the Devil, there were jokes and insinuations that he abused children, etc.
Obviously, this caused a huge moral scandal. At first people reacted very negatively to these memes, but eventually they stopped shocking anyone. They still left a permanent mark on Polish internet culture, though, which this post is a pretty good example of.
Poles meme the number 2137 because the Pope died at 21:37. Every Pole knows this because the whole cult surrounding the Pope drilled that fact into our heads from childhood.
Sorry for writing such a massive wall of text. You could literally write entire books about this phenomenon.