By Maureen Mullarkey
Jorge Bergoglio found his Leni Riefenstahl in Wim Wenders. I went to see Wenders’ “Pope Francis: A Man of His Word” expecting hagiography. What I watched came closer to pornography. It was the pornography of blatant propaganda, that notorious key to “the heart of the broad masses.” Lust for dominance is airbrushed into a semblance of piety; avarice for celebrity is lighted and staged to look like humility.
Contrary to the court press, Damon Linker recently ascribed “psychological acuity and Machiavellian cunning” to Pope Francis. And he is correct. But Linker’s interest lies in the Catholic Church’s eventual alignment with contemporary mores, especially legitimization of homosexuality. Yet there remains a larger, more compelling issue: the sacralization of politics via the person of the pope himself. Francis is not reforming the church but denaturing it, reducing it to a social tool.
Commissioned by the Vatican, the film ups the ante on papalolotry. Its deluge of glorifying images stimulates devotion to Bergoglio himself, papa to all the world. A quasi-erotic glow infuses the whole. It is the eros of surrender to a liberator, a defender against ideological bogeys: “the globalization of indifference”; “money drenched in blood”; “fear of foreigners.” The old creed proclaimed Christ risen. The new Bergoglian one, emblazoned on St. Peter’s dome during the 2016 light show repeated here, proclaims: “Planet Earth first.”
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