THE Two Popes, a Netflix movie that premiered last week, looks like a two-character play. The plot revolves around conversations between Cardinal Bergoglio and Pope Benedict XVI. The Pope has invited the Cardinal from Argentina to spend a few days in Castel Gandolfo, summer residence of the popes. The imaginary dialogues take place in 2012, one year before Benedict is to make modern history by resigning the papacy.
With both the retired pope and the sitting pope alive today and living within meters of each other in the Vatican, the temptation was too strong for the filmmakers to resist: Put the two together and let’s hear what they have to say to each other.
The Two Popes is engrossing to Catholics and, presumably, ex-Catholics. We are watching the two leaders of the world’s 1.2 billion members of the one, true, universal Church engaged in man-to-man talk about their faith and their belief in God and the future of mankind. At the same time, we wonder: In real life, what would the two popes say about the movie that’s about them?
The concept is most interesting. In 2012, the Cardinal from Buenos Aires seeks permission from Pope Benedict to retire, he wants to go back and resume his pastoral duties as a parish priest. His mission is a foreshadowing of Benedict’s own decision to retire from the throne of St. Peter. Who would guess that one year after their imaginary chit-chat, it would be Ratzinger who would step down for reasons of old age, paving the way for the election of Bergoglio?
Comparisons between the two popes could not be more dramatic. The conservative, intellectual Ratzinger who plays the piano and confesses that German jokes are not meant to be funny. The smiling, liberal Bergoglio, a people’s pope, impatient to bring Catholics back to the fold, including the imperfect ones, and into the millennium.
What could they discuss without disagreeing? The film shows them walking around the sunlit gardens discussing matters of earth and heaven. They sit down to watch Germany beat Argentina in a World Cup championship game. Against the magnificence of Sistine Chapel and the high-ceilinged, regal salons of Castel Gandolfo, we see two powerful but lonely old men, each on the brink of giving up.
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