Kourtney Kardashian and Travis Barker Do Catholic Cosplay for Third Wedding
God loves all his children but maybe not the Kardashians that much
This weekend Travis Barker and Kourtney Kardashian tied the knot for the third time in a garish, sacrilegious ceremony in Italy with all the Kardashian sisters (and no Rob) in tow. The event was, like all things Kardashian, too much and not enough, and very, very far from God’s light.
Lately the Kardashians have taken on a bizarrely conservative bent; their show is a family-values affair in which the most important things are motherhood and a monochromatic household. Kourtney and Travis’s arc in the family’s new Hulu show pays lip service to blended families and religious goodness, all the while the two are scolded by their parents, siblings, and children alike: please stop French kissing.
Kourtney and Travis’s Italian ceremony was evidently sponsored by Dolce & Gabbana, which dressed the girls in outfits ranging from Kourtney’s infantile bridal romper featuring a Virgin Mary veil to match her thrice-married husband’s tattoo to Kim’s see-through mourning gown to Khloe’s Met Gala knockoff. Kendall couldn’t even walk up stairs in her outfit. Barker, the only real Catholic there, looked nice in a tux.
Kourtney, to her minimal credit, converted to the Armenian Apostolic Church in 2019, though what that means in the greatest context of her life remains mysterious. The silence over whether Kourtney believes in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, for instance, is deafening. The rest of the Kardashian family remain “vaguely Christian,” looped into Kris Jenner’s California Community Church, a Protestant tax write-off. If the family wanted to do a real Roman Catholic ceremony, in honor of Barker’s faith, they could have, and it’s possible, maybe, for them to have performed the marriage sacrament without the desire to glam it up. That’s not to say the Catholic faith is without resplendence: the sacrament of Anointing the Sick is nothing without glitz and glamor, but maybe less likely to get sponsored by a major designer.
Why the big ceremony then? Maybe it was just a shallow performance, as was getting married for the third time to the same person, or perhaps because Catholic aesthetics are “in” right now, with neither a reckoning of what those symbols mean to believers nor a grappling of the politics of the Church. It’s possible, too, the Kardashians think this is what “being Italian” looks like, chintzy saint-adorned clothing like they’re all bidding farewell to a lost capo. Regardless, the affair was done with little respect and less taste, with God not mad, but maybe a little disappointed, especially at how little pasta they served.
