On Good Friday I showed my children the movie adaptation of Godspell (sold to my eleven-year-old daughter as coming from Stephen Schwartz, the same composer as Wicked). The film uses the backdrop of early 1970s New York City in all its gritty “Fun City” glory to stage its whimsical yet serious retelling of the Gospel of Matthew, showing male and female disciples leaving their various walks of life and heading into the streets, parks, and junkyards. In watching it, I was unwittingly preparing to absorb some of the key lessons of the pontificate of Pope Francis just a few days before his death.
Something that jumps out in Francis’s autobiography Hope (which charmingly reads like a freewheeling conversation with the man) is his love of film. This includes works from directors like Ingmar Bergman and Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose cinematic interests often diverged from “pious” themes. Like Benedict XVI’s love of classical music (summed up in his comment that listening to Mozart, one knows that the faith is true), this first cinephile pope’s preoccupation with film has something to tell us about his priorities.
Cinema and kinetic are related words, and film is inherently a medium of motion. D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, now infamous for its racism and glorification of the Ku Klux Klan, stunned audience members with its horseback tracking shots that made them feel like they were about to be run over. Film is also a populist medium compared to other communal entertainment, available for a reasonable price at a theater near you. It is no coincidence that Francis struck up a rapport with Martin Scorsese; in addition to their shared Italian Catholic heritage and love of the neo-realists and Fellini, Scorsese is the quintessential modern director of motion, utilizing plentiful tracking shots and jump cuts, most famously in Goodfellas.
Like Scorsese, Francis was at heart an urbanist who relished riding the buses and subways of Buenos Aires, living the life of a “street priest” as much as he could given the responsibilities of a cardinal archbishop. In his last days as pope, it was clear he wanted nothing more than to be in St. Peter’s Square with the people. His shunning of the papal apartments for a smaller room in essentially a hotel evinced the attitude of an urban dweller who needed a place to sleep and put things down but really wanted to live in the action. Synods under Francis, with round tables more conducive to movement and spontaneity than the long desks of past gatherings, were oriented more to conversation than results. For Francis, the medium was the message (to quote another famous Catholic, Marshall McLuhan) and the process was the point, even if in some cases—particularly concerning the role of women in the Church—the process seemed to spin its wheels.
Given these preoccupations, it should not be surprising that one of Francis’s most consistent themes was that of the Church in motion. For Francis, standing still led the institution to become sclerotic and self-referential, to forget the Gospel centered on an itinerant preacher in favor of emphasizing the religion that absorbed an empire. Scorsese’s Last Temptation of Christ was lambasted at the time for its scene exploring (and rejecting in orthodox fashion) sex as a way of rejecting the cross, but the less titillating temptation pointed out by that exact sequence—choosing comfortable domesticity over self-sacrifice—remains one of the fundamental problems of the post-Constantinian Church. These inherited imperial dynamics, for Catholics, cannot simply be undone wholesale; as Americans have learned through the depredations of the Department of Government Efficiency, large and complex institutions contain excess and bloat yet also the capacity to do enormous good for people. But institutional complacency and navel-gazing must be resisted lest Christendom overwhelm Christianity.
The “Church which goes forth” thus became a signature element of Francis’s teaching, going back to the 2013 apostolic exhortation Evangelii gaudium, which served essentially as a constitution for his pontificate. This image became tied to the similar image of the Church as a field hospital for sinners—ready to pack up and move to where it is needed most. A physical embodiment of this priority was the installation of showers under the colonnades of St. Peter’s, using the historical infrastructure of the Church in service to the marginalized. Francis’s pilgrimages to places such as Lampedusa and the U.S.-Mexico border, as well as his pastoral care for transgender people (sometimes in tension with the rhetoric of teaching documents on related matters), reflected this priority of putting the Church’s moral authority on the line precisely where human life and dignity were under threat.
With this image and priority for the Church, it is easy to understand why Francis had such a distaste for traditionalism. Its fetishization of an imagined recent past rests precisely on the idea that aspects of the Church cannot and should not change, and must remain staunch in order to guard and preserve the deposit of faith. Retrofuturism in the Church might be packaged as Dimes Square right-radical chic, but it ends up in Fellini’s ecclesial fashion show from Roma, which Francis surely knew in all its hilarity and pathos.
In Terrence Malick’s 2012 film To the Wonder, Javier Bardem’s doubting priest Fr. Quintana finds the meaning of his ministry in the accompaniment of those on the margins, culminating in a scene in which he recites the Breastplate of St. Patrick as the viewer witnesses his acts of service. That movie was released in U.S. theaters right around the time of Francis’s election (it occasioned the beautiful last review by Roger Ebert, a lapsed Catholic to whom Francis might have taken a liking) in what felt at the time like more than a coincidence. Like Fr. Quintana and the street disciples of Godspell, Pope Francis called Catholics to take the gospel off the page and out of their comfort zones. He pleaded, like Eva Marie Saint’s character Edie in Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (Scorsese’s ur-text): “Did you ever hear of a saint hiding in a church?”
