How Melanie Martinez’s “THE VATICAN” Revives an Old Religious Joke

There is something strangely old-fashioned about Melanie Martinez’s “THE VATICAN”.

That may sound unlikely. The song, from her 2026 album HADES, is deliberately modern in its targets and language. It moves through Catholic imagery, sexual repression, queer shame, American politics, guns, male authority, and religious scandal with very little interest in being polite about them. Its production makes the collision even harder to miss. Church-like voices and solemn religious sounds give way to electronic pop, while the language of worship is steadily turned into the language of sex.

Martinez has been clear about the anger behind it. Speaking to Billboard about HADES in 2026, she said she grew up Christian and still respects people’s desire for faith and religious community. Her objection is to what happens when organised religion can “weaponize spirituality”, abuse power and spread shame among LGBTQ youth. In other words, “THE VATICAN” is not presented as a song about the foolishness of believing in God. It is about the distance between what religious institutions say they represent and what people sometimes do under their authority.

That distinction has a surprisingly long history.

Centuries before pop musicians learned that Catholic imagery could cause controversy, medieval European writers were already turning prayers, Masses, and clerical authority into jokes about drinking, sex, greed, and bodily functions. Some of the people writing those parodies were not enemies of Christianity. They were clerics themselves.

“THE VATICAN” is not descended from those texts in any direct sense. There is no reason to believe Martinez was thinking about medieval Latin parody while writing the song. The resemblance is interesting for another reason. It shows how durable one form of religious satire has been: when an institution presents itself as sacred, one of the quickest ways to challenge its authority is to drag its language back into the body.

A Mass for People Who Would Rather Drink

Religious parody was already well established in medieval Europe. In her 2022 essay “For Mine Is the Bitter, the Ale and the Lager: Parodic Prayer and the Spirituality of Humour”, Anita Houck, professor of religious studies and theology, wrote about the history of parodic prayer and traced a particularly rich tradition from the 11th through the 16th centuries. Medieval writers rewrote prayers and sometimes entire parts of the Mass around ordinary appetites such as drinking, gambling, and sex. Crucially, Houck notes that scholars have good reason to believe many of the authors were young clerics. Their detailed knowledge of Latin worship suggests that the joke often came from people who knew the religious language from the inside (Acta Theologica, 2022).

One of the best examples is the medieval tradition of the Drinkers’ Mass. The joke was simple enough to understand even without much knowledge of Latin. Familiar phrases from worship were twisted until they belonged in a tavern. In one famous bit of wordplay, oremus, “let us pray”, became potemus, “let us drink”.

It sounds childish because, in one sense, it is. That is precisely why it works.

A sacred formula receives much of its force from repetition, seriousness and recognition. The audience knows how it is supposed to sound. Change one word and the entire atmosphere collapses. The solemn becomes physical. Worship becomes an appetite. A form designed to raise the mind toward God suddenly smells of wine, dice and a crowded room.

The point was not always the same. Medieval religious parody could be playful rather than rebellious. Some examples seem closer to insider humour than attacks on Christianity. Houck warns against assuming that every parody of a prayer is automatically a parody of faith. Sometimes the sacred text remains authoritative while the world around it becomes the joke.

That distinction matters when considering Melanie Martinez.

“THE VATICAN” uses Catholic language aggressively, but the song’s target is not difficult to locate. Martinez has described faith and community as things she respects. Her anger is directed toward the use of religious authority to shame, control, and excuse abuse. In that sense, sacred language is not only what the song attacks. It is also the standard against which religious hypocrisy is judged.

The Body Is a Weapon Against Authority

Another reason religious satire so often becomes vulgar is that institutions speak in ideals, while bodies are stubbornly real.

The Church can speak about purity, restraint, confession, spiritual authority and the separation of the sacred from the profane. Satire responds by asking about hunger, money, sex, desire, embarrassment and everything else a respectable institution may prefer to keep under control.

Geoffrey Chaucer understood the value of this contrast particularly well.

The Canterbury Tales contains several church figures whose behaviour sits badly beside their religious office. The target is not every Christian character. Chaucer’s Parson, for example, is treated with respect. His more corrupt clerical characters are funny because they demand moral seriousness from other people while failing to embody it themselves.

Modern scholarship on Chaucer’s anticlerical satire has stressed this difference. Theologist Jin Sunwoo argues that Chaucer’s ridicule centres on the gap between religious teaching and religious practice rather than on the simple rejection of religion. His clerical targets misuse their positions, allowing satire to expose abuses of authority (Jin Sunwoo, “Laughing at Church Abuse in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales: Satire as a Tool for Reform”, Modern Studies in English Language and Literature, 2024).

Chaucer could be spectacularly crude.

In “The Summoner’s Tale”, a friar visits a sick man and presses him for a donation. The supposedly holy exchange ends with the man giving the friar a fart instead. The joke is not merely that flatulence is funny. The tale turns the friar’s claims to spiritual authority into something physical, embarrassing and impossible to dignify. Scholars have even read the ending as a parody of Pentecost, replacing sacred breath with the lowest sort of bodily wind.

That is an extreme example of a very old comic instinct. The higher the claim to purity, the stronger the temptation to remind its speaker that human beings still possess bodies.

Melanie Martinez works with the same collision in “THE VATICAN”, although her subject is sexual rather than scatological. Catholic practices and symbols are repeatedly pulled down from the level of spirit into the level of flesh. Kneeling can belong to prayer, but it can also suggest sexual submission. “Holy water” can carry one meaning inside a church and a very different one inside an erotic joke. Confession can be sacramental or intimate. Celibacy can be an act of religious discipline, but Martinez turns it into material for a joke about repression.

A close annotation of the religious references running through “THE VATICAN” shows how thoroughly the song depends on these reversals. References to confession, holy water, celibacy, Christian worship, the Trinity, and older religious language are not scattered decorations. The satire repeatedly works by taking a sacred idea and making it bodily.

The technique is medieval even when the politics are not.

Melanie Martinez Builds a Church Before Attacking It

The sound of “THE VATICAN” makes this clearer.

Martinez does not begin with an ordinary pop arrangement and simply add a few religious words. Reviews of HADES noticed the song’s church-like atmosphere, including its choir and hymnal character before the electronic production takes over. RIFF Magazine describes a haunting hymn moving into a synth-driven beat, while other reviews note the deliberate combination of religious and electronic sounds.

That choice matters because parody depends on recognition.

The Drinkers’ Mass only works if the listener knows what a Mass sounds like. A rewritten prayer only works if its original form remains audible underneath. Chaucer’s jokes about clergy work because the audience understands what religious officials are supposed to represent.

Melanie Martinez similarly gives the listener a sacred frame before disturbing it.

The music briefly creates the expectation of solemnity. Then the lyrics refuse to behave solemnly. Instead of leaving religious ritual safely in the background, Martinez keeps returning to its gestures and vocabulary, giving them new physical meanings.

It is tempting to call this blasphemy and stop there, but that description misses what makes the device effective. Simple blasphemy only needs to insult something sacred. Satire needs the sacred thing to remain recognisable.

If Martinez simply rejected the Catholic language, the song would lose much of its force. She needs worship. She needs confession. She needs kneeling, holiness, celibacy and the authority represented by the Vatican. The song works by borrowing their seriousness and then redirecting it.

This is why religious parody can produce such strong reactions. The audience is being asked to embrace the double entendre. A ritual can remain meaningful to a believer while becoming comic material in the hands of a critic. The joke does not erase the sacred meaning. It depends on it.

Houck makes a useful point about medieval parody: knowing what the joke attacks is not always straightforward. A parody can appear to attack prayer while actually using the authority of prayer to criticise something else. That uncertainty still matters today.

When Melanie Martinez sexualises a religious gesture, is the joke aimed at Christianity itself, the men who claim authority through it, sexual repression, political conservatism, or all of these at once? Different listeners will answer differently. That instability helps explain why “THE VATICAN” can sound liberating to one listener and needlessly offensive to another.

Satire Can Fall Flat

Recognising the tradition behind Martinez’s method does not settle whether every joke in “THE VATICAN” works.

Some critics have objected to the way the song links religious hypocrisy, closeted sexuality and the abuse of boys. Slant Magazine, for example, argues that the song caricatures LGBTQ people alongside the religious conservatives it wants to criticise (Michael Savio, “Melanie Martinez ‘Hades’ Review: Insubstantial Dark Pop”, Slant Magazine, 2026).

That criticism is worth taking seriously.

Satire can expose hypocrisy while also relying on stereotypes. An attack on homophobia can become awkward if its punchline implies that a homophobic man must secretly be gay. A criticism of clerical sexual abuse becomes even more delicate when homosexuality, celibacy, and the abuse of children are pushed too close together. Historical precedent does not excuse careless writing.

Medieval satire had the same problem in different forms. Its jokes could expose corruption and still carry the prejudices of the society that produced them. The fact that writers have used obscenity against authority for centuries tells us something about the durability of the method, not about the moral perfection of every joke.

This is also where Melanie Martinez differs sharply from the young clerics who produced many medieval religious parodies. They often worked from inside the institution whose language they borrowed. Martinez speaks from a contemporary popular culture in which Christian institutions, queer identity, American conservatism and celebrity politics meet in very different ways.

The targets have changed. So have the stakes. What has survived is the basic comic machinery.

Take something treated as untouchable. Repeat its language closely enough that everyone recognises it. Then introduce the body.

Beer can replace prayer. A fart can answer a sermon. Sexual desire can interrupt a hymn.

The joke announces that sacred authority does not float above ordinary human weakness. The people who wear robes, preach restraint, or claim moral certainty still live in bodies. They still want things. They still have the capacity for hypocrisy.

That is why the technique keeps returning.

An Old Joke in a New Argument

“The Vatican” belongs to a very contemporary political moment. Martinez has said some of HADES was written while real events unfolded around her, and she has connected this particular song to the period around the 2024 Republican National Convention. Its references come from the 21st century, and its anger is aimed at present forms of power. Its basic structure, of course, reaches much further back.

For almost as long as European Christianity has possessed formal sacred language, people have found ways to parody that language. Sometimes they did it to mock the Church. Sometimes they did it from inside the Church. Sometimes the joke was little more than a joke. At other times, religious language became a weapon used against people who failed to live by the standards they preached. That history complicates the easiest reading of Martinez’s song.

“THE VATICAN” may sound like shock pop because its obscenity is loud and deliberate. Yet there is nothing particularly new about putting the sacred beside the vulgar. Medieval writers were comfortable sending liturgy into taverns and using bodily humour against clergy. Chaucer understood that one fart could puncture a long performance of moral authority.

Martinez’s version is louder, electronic, sexual, and shaped by modern political arguments. Still, the underlying joke would not be entirely unfamiliar to an audience from centuries ago.

The sacred says: look upward. Satire waits a moment, then reminds us to look at the people doing the preaching. Sometimes that is where the real story begins.

Works Cited

Houck, A. “For Mine Is the Bitter, the Ale and the Lager: Parodic Prayer and the Spirituality of Humour”. Acta Theologica, vol. 42, no. 2. 2022.

Martinez, Melanie. Interview with Hannah Daly. “Melanie Martinez on Expanding Her Universe With ‘Hades’ | In Conversation.” Billboard. 2026.

Savio, Michael. “Melanie Martinez ‘Hades’ Review: Insubstantial Dark Pop.” Slant Magazine. 2026.

Sunwoo, Jin. “Laughing at Church Abuse in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales: Satire as a Tool for Reform.” Modern Studies in English Language and Literature, vol. 68, no. 2, 2024, pp. 211-230.

Cooper, Helen. “The Summoner’s Tale”. Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales, 3rd ed., Oxford University Press. 2023.