“This is the Jesus I like, the one that moved me during the Holy Week procession,” says Spanish-Argentine model and influencer Georgina Rodriguez, long-term partner of footballer Cristiano Ronaldo, while filming a solo trip to an otherwise deserted Santa Cruz Church in central Madrid for the Netflix Spanish reality show <em>I Am Georgina</em>. “Ever since I was little,” she continues, “I’ve gone to church to light candles for God. It’s a tradition and something I need.”
Many mysteries abound in the typical narrative of 30-year-old Rodriguez’s life. Particularly when it comes to love, family and the at once fairytale-like, yet formidable, public persona she has cultivated – and protected – since embarking on one of the most dramatic, and successful, lifestyle transformations imaginable upon meeting Ronaldo, one of the most famous footballers in the world, in 2016.
Living out her life on the global stage, faith has emerged as a prominent link in her armoury, but not only as you might expect: when Rodriguez cloaks herself in Catholic aesthetics, she wants them to stand out. Her style is completely different to any other young Catholic influencer you are likely to come across, traditional or liberal. The combination is proving alluring to audiences. Her trip to the Santa Cruz Church occurred in episode five of season three of the hugely popular <em>Netflix</em> series.
Visiting the Santa Cruz Church, Rodriguez is impeccably made-up, wearing a full-length, figure-hugging white dress accented by an exotic-skin Hermès Himalaya Birkin handbag, one of the luxury house’s rarest designs. She is filmed praying the rosary, lighting multiple candles, touching a card bearing Ronaldo’s likeness to the carved feet of Saint Jude, contemplating an elaborately dressed image of Our Lady of Sorrows (“I cried with her during Holy Week”) and purchasing a stack of holy candles to take home for loved ones. Red roses are offered to the purple-robed, cross-carrying Christ.
Her quiet commentary while inside is delivered in sensitive, sometimes emotional tones, as though sharing with friends (of which she currently counts 64 million on Instagram alone; Ronaldo has 640 million followers). A subsequent photograph of the trip posted to her <em>Instagram</em> account attracted more than 2.4 million likes.
The staging is beautiful, of course. Trained dancer Rodriguez is perfectly poised as ever. But don’t let all the extra gloss cloud your vision of her on-screen witness. She is the only one visibly present in the building, after all. Her faith feels genuine and its foundations have been tested.
Rewind to season one, episode five, filmed during spring 2021, and a trip to the village of Graus in the Spanish Pyrenees, where Buenos Aires-born Rodriguez once worked at a hotel during the truffle season. The episode sees the series’ star similarly spotlight the sixteenth-century Basilica of Our Lady of the Rock, also home to a Christ the Redeemer statue since 1950.
“I had no friends in Graus,” she narrates. She explains this led to her venturing up to the basilica each evening between 5 p.m. and 8 p.m.: “I used to go and listen to the nuns pray the rosary, the Our Father and then Mass. On my days off, I’d go and take flowers to the Virgin. The basilica has this strength, a power.
“I am very religious; I have always felt God’s protection. God has always been an inspiration and source of strength to fight and to know what is best for me.”
In the scene that follows, the audience is shown a then 27-year-old Rodriguez shedding tears in front of a Madonna and Child statue before stretching out her hand to touch Our Lady’s mantle. It's all filmed rather cinematographically, as tends to be the show’s style.
The aspiring model would ultimately uproot to Madrid in pursuit of a career in high-end retail, going on to meet Ronaldo while working as a sales assistant at Gucci.
It is this facet of Rodriguez’s Cinderella-esque story, along with her subsequent taste for diamonds and other precious stones, her <em>Instagram</em>-documented family life, lavish gifts from her partner such as an almost 1.4-metre-tall Louis Vuitton jewellery cabinet worth in excess of £100,000 and her modelling career as a Guess girl, on magazine covers and beyond, that, not surprisingly, often shines through the loudest and the brightest in media reports.
But catch Rodriguez in an episode of her own show and she can actually come across as something of a confident and considered, hidden-in-plain sight Catholic evangelist.
Take her pilgrimage, for example, to Portugal’s Fatima shrine after the death of her baby son Angel on Easter Monday of 2022, shown in season two.
“For me, being in church is like being at home," she says during the nearly four-and-a-half minutes of the show dedicated to the visit. "I feel nurtured by God, the Virgin Mary and the angels,” she elaborates.
Covering her hair with a black-and-white Chanel silk scarf, carefully knotted below the chin (by her make-up artist), the influencer carries two bouquets of roses as she ascends the cathedral’s steps. One bouquet for Angel, the other for his surviving twin sister Bella Esmeralda.
Later, beeswax candles are lit and multiple medals, rosaries and bracelets purchased, as is a large statue of Our Lady of Fatima, which Rodriguez has blessed by a priest. More camera time is then dedicated to the placing of this same statue in an apartment she shares with Ronaldo in the Portuguese capital: “We love Virgin Mary statues. A statue of Jesus Christ, a rosary, some angels…but we didn’t have any in Lisbon.” A photograph of her children with the statue posted to <em>Instagram</em> in mid-October of last year garnered 1.26 million likes.
Rodriguez’s subsequent return to Fatima in June this year, where she was pictured lighting candles and attending Mass with her four younger children, won just under 5 million <em>Instagram</em> likes. A video uploaded as part of the same carousel post shows them all receiving a priestly blessing with the shrine building in the background.
Following its September debut, season three of her <em>Netflix</em> show drew 6 million-plus views in three weeks, representing roughly 26.5 million hours of viewing time, ranking it among the streaming service’s top ten non-English TV shows globally.
Rodriguez says she is a true romantic who describes seeing hearts in everything from coffee <em>crema</em> to slices of bread. But she is also a thoroughly self-assured leading lady. Her looks, like her steps, are often bold, dazzling and unmissable; she still styles the majority of her own red carpet appearances. Rodriguez is not modest, but maybe, for this day and age, she was never meant to be.
All of which makes it all the more striking that her entirely deliberate, near didactic, moments of megawatt visual evangelisation have until now gone largely unnoticed by those of us in the Anglosphere. Some may counter, Well, it's not that surprising, given all that blinding wealth and glamour, with the Catholic aesthetic only leveraged for cinematic and emotional effect.
Indeed, some may find the ostentation of it all off putting, if not unsightly. But look at the reach: it's beyond the powers of most bishops and cardinals. If watching the show piques the interest of a viewer to head into an old Spanish church, or into an old church anywhere, or to start wondering about all this talk of rosaries, and to then look into the matter – that doesn't seem such a bad thing.
<em>Photo: Georgina Rodriguez poses on the red carpet of the 80th Venice Film Festival at Venice Lido, Venice, Italy, 5 September 2023. (Photo by TIZIANA FABI/AFP via Getty Images.)</em>
<em>Charlotte Robson is a freelance writer who does original features, fashion news, shopping roundups, creative writing and poetry. She can be contacted at <a href="https://www.charlotterobson.com/"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">charlotterobson.com</mark></a>.</em>
