They confess to each other. Bergoglio tells a story of his love as a young man for a woman in his native Buenos Aires. On the point of betrothal, ring in pocket, he is persuaded by a mysterious priest to pursue his religious vocation and dump the fiancée. The story is nonsense, based on a “love letter” Bergoglio sent to a childhood sweetheart, Amalia Damonte, when the pair were 12, declaring that if she would not marry him he would go off to be a priest. Amalia’s parents forbade her to see him again.
Bergoglio now recalls, by means of dramatized flashbacks and actual newsreel material, the Dirty War in Argentina during the late 1970s. The military government extended its campaign against Marxist-Che terrorists to wider, liberal segments of the population. Father Bergoglio S.J., now head of the Jesuits, orders two priests to abandon their slum parishes for their own protection. They refuse and he suspends them from pastoral duties, making them vulnerable to arrest and torture. This sequence hews much more closely to reality than the rest of the film, but its mix of actual hand-held news footage and dramatized reconstruction serves to lull the audience into a sense of unwarranted credibility in the wider narrative.
Now it’s Benedict’s turn. His garbled outpouring of papal sins is told as if from a distance under water. We barely hear “Marcial Maciel,” a name with singularly nasty connotations among well-informed Catholics. Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder of the order of priests known as Legionaries of Christ, was a serial pedophile, favored by Pope John Paul II when Benedict, as Cardinal Ratzinger, was head of the theological orthodoxy department in the Vatican. We are clearly meant to infer that Benedict covered up the crimes of a major clerical abuser, and an outraged Bergoglio berates Benedict for his shocking failure.
The facts, however, are dramatically different. While John Paul II refused to believe the evidence against Macial, it was Benedict who, upon becoming pope, moved against Macial. Benedict’s fans are already protesting this error in biographical accuracy. Writing in the Catholic periodical First Things, the Catholic writer John Waters has condemned the scene in First Things as “false and grossly libellous.”
In the film, Bergoglio is actively opposed to the idea of becoming pope. In reality, Pope Francis evidently had a well-planned set of policies ready ahead of his election, which he articulated in a pre-conclave speech: non-judgmental acceptance of LGBTQ communities, rejection of clericalism, close collaboration with other religions, admission of divorced re-marrieds to the Eucharist, readiness to discuss women deacons and a married priests, emphasizing sins against the environment over sex and “life” issues, a bid to turn the church inside out—creating a World Church of far-flung parishes for which the Vatican would become a mere service office. Had Benedict suspected that Bergoglio would be elected, and had he sussed an inkling of his disrupt-or-die agenda, he surely would have canceled his resignation in an instant.
So why, in reality, did Benedict resign? The accepted reason is that he was unable to cope with the tsunami of church problems owing to the frailties of his advanced age. But is this entirely plausible? Many popes, including John Paul II, have carried on in poorer health. Perhaps there was something else?
For 600 years, no pope has ever known the name of his successor, or the fate of his own legacy, because all of them without exception have left the scene by dying. In my article on the real two popes published in these pages last October, I suggested that Benedict’s final “temptation” was an overweening curiosity to see, and even affect, the next papacy. In the movie, Benedict admits as much in an easily missed throwaway line: “There’s a saying: God always corrects one pope by presenting the world with another pope.” Then he mumbles, “I should like to see my correction.” In other words, I should like to see my successor. True or false, for me it was the most dramatic moment of the movie.