Can you think of the movies that impacted you most deeply in your childhood, young adulthood, and later in life? I can. So could Pope Francis.
Pope Francis, Jorge Bergoglio, was born on December 17, 1936. The emerging art form of cinema and the future pope grew up together. He credits his parents with introducing him to film at the neighborhood theater in Argentina.
He also mentions movies prominently in his autobiography Hope and it is intriguing to see how the three films he has mentioned most intersected with his life.
As a boy, Pope Francis’ dreams of Christian heroism were fed by the film Rome: Open City.
The future pope was 10 when Roberto Rossellini’s early masterpiece about the fall of Rome to the Nazis was released in Argentina. “Our parents took us to see all the films of that period,” Pope Francis said, naming the great neo-realist director and his Rome: Open City.
The film was created in the ruins of 1945 Rome shortly after German troops left the city. The title refers to the way a city responds to occupation — pronouncing your city “open,” rather than militarily defending it, minimizes harm. The story follows various storylines in the early occupation of Rome that intersect in the end, and produce three powerful scenes of main characters killed while opposing the Nazis: A pregnant woman, a young man, and a priest all give their lives, on screen, in harrowing fashion.
“There are scenes in Rome: Open City that I always remember,” Francis wrote in his autobiography. Then he names the actors playing the woman and the priest who are killed in the film.
“Anna Magnani and Aldo Fabrizi were our teachers,” he said, “on fighting, on hope, on wisdom.”
The movie ends following children who had witnessed the heroic death of a priest. They walk away changed by what they had seen — and it isn’t hard to picture Pope Francis as a child walking from the theater, transformed, as well.
The future pope saw Federico Fellini’s La Strada at the age when he was first discovering his vocation.
“I identify with La Strada, which I saw when I was 18,” he said. In the past, and in his new book, Pope Francis has described an experience he had in the confessional when he was 16 as a moment when he knew he was going to be a priest. As his vocation developed, he discovered the movie La Strada, which he would speak about for the rest of his life.
In particular, he speaks of a “a crucial scene” in which two circus workers — an acrobat and a clown — discuss the meaning of the universe.
The acrobat insists that every pebble has a purpose, though only God can know what it is. He says a pebble “must have some purpose. Because, if it is useless, then everything is useless: Even the stars. And even you. You too have some purpose.”
Pope Francis calls this speech “Franciscan” and says Christ provides our purpose. “There’s the stone. There’s us, little stones on the ground, and ‘the stone that the builders rejected’ but which ‘has become the cornerstone,’ which gives meaning to everything, even to what we don’t understand.”
The movie focuses on the relationship of two people at the peripheries of society and demonstrates how authentic love — eventually — overcomes dishonesty and violence. You can see Pope Francis’ “culture of encounter” and belief in the power of accompaniment foreshadowed in the story.
Finally, Babette’s Feast framed the mature man’s attitude toward human love.
The future pope was 50 when Babette’s Feast was released and quickly embraced in Catholic intellectual circles.
Bishop Barron has written at length about the Eucharistic nature of this parable, in which a French widow makes an extravagant meal for her Puritan employers, pouring her time, money, and love into a meal that transforms its recipients.
Pope Francis wrote about it in his encyclical Amoris Laetitia as an example of how “there is no greater joy than that of sharing good things.”
“The most intense joys in life arise when we are able to elicit joy in others,” he says. “Think of the lovely scene in the film Babette’s Feast, when the generous cook receives a grateful hug and praise: ‘Ah, how you will delight the angels!’”
Together, these movies helped make the man whom the whole world is mourning.
“Stories influence our lives, whether in the form of fairy tales, novels, films, songs, news, even if we do not always realize it,” Pope Francis said. “Stories leave their mark on us; they shape our convictions and our behavior.”
He knew that first hand, as a young boy inspired by sacrificial love; a young man who saw value in every person; and as an older man who saw that love’s final fulfillment is in heaven. We pray that he is seeing that now, more than ever.
