UNITED STATES
The New Yorker
February 2, 2020
By Paul Elie
February 2, 2020
[PHOTO: The conflict between traditionalists and progressives in the Roman Catholic Church has hardened around Popes Benedict XVI and Francis and tipped toward an open dispute.]
Of the many fanciful scenes in the movie “The Two Popes,” the most striking is one set in 2012, in which Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the future Pope, from Argentina, teaches Benedict XVI, the current Pope, from Germany, how to tango. Bergoglio (Jonathan Pryce) has spent two days in private meetings with Benedict (Anthony Hopkins). No such encounter took place, but the screenwriter dreamed it up in order to present the very real differences that have emerged between the progressive Bergoglio and the traditionalist Benedict over the future direction of the Church. When the time comes for Bergoglio to depart, the men exit the papal apartments, via a tourist-thronged Sistine Chapel, and go to where a black Mercedes-Benz is waiting to take Bergoglio to the airport. Apropos of nothing, Benedict points out that even the radical Saint Francis of Assisi, Bergoglio’s future namesake, got some things wrong. Bergoglio replies that the saint loved to dance and suggests that if he’d lived in modern times he would have done the tango. “Come, I’ll show you,” he says. The camera moves in, and they dance: two men, both past threescore and ten, one in black, one in white, face-to-face, hand-in-hand, lurching across the paving stones.
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