On Wednesday, Afineevsky’s 48th birthday, the director said Francis presented him with a birthday cake during a private meeting at the Vatican.īut “Francesco” is more than a biopic about the pope. The two recently exchanged Yom Kippur greetings Afineevsky is a Russian-born Jew now based in Los Angeles.
Pontiff soulver movie#
The director worked official and unofficial channels starting in early 2018, and ended up so close to Francis by the end of the project that he showed the pope the movie on his iPad in August. “Listen, when you are in the Vatican, the only way to achieve something is to break the rule and then to say, ‘I’m sorry,’” Afineevsky said in an interview ahead of the premiere. He said he negotiated his way in through persistence, and deliveries of Argentine mate tea and Alfajores cookies that he got to the pope via some well-connected Argentines in Rome. Cruz tells his own story in snippets throughout the film, chronicling both Francis’ evolution on understanding sexual abuse as well as to document the pope’s views on gay people.ĭirector Evgeny Afineevsky had remarkable access to cardinals, the Vatican television archives and the pope himself. One of the main characters in the documentary is Juan Carlos Cruz, the Chilean survivor of clergy sexual abuse whom Francis initially discredited during a 2018 visit to Chile.Ĭruz, who is gay, said that during his first meetings with the pope in May 2018 after they patched things up, Francis assured him that God made Cruz gay. That document was signed by the then-prefect of the office, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI and Francis’ predecessor. “The church cannot support the acceptance of objectively immoral relationships.”Ĭatholic teaching holds that gays must be treated with dignity and respect but that homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered.” A 2003 document from the Vatican’s doctrine office stated that the church’s respect for gays “cannot lead in any way to approval of homosexual behavior or to legal recognition of homosexual unions.”ĭoing so, the Vatican reasoned, would not only condone “deviant behavior,” but create an equivalence to marriage, which the church holds is an indissoluble union between man and woman. “The pope’s statement clearly contradicts what has been the long-standing teaching of the church about same-sex unions,” Tobin said in a statement. However, the conservative bishop of Providence, Rhode Island, Thomas Tobin, immediately called for clarification. “The pope’s speaking positively about civil unions also sends a strong message to places where the church has opposed such laws,” Martin said in a statement. James Martin, praised the pope’s comments as “a major step forward in the church’s support for LGBT people.” The Jesuit priest who has been at the forefront in seeking to build bridges with gays in the church, the Rev. However, he had never come out publicly in favor of civil unions as pope, and no pontiff before him had, either. While serving as archbishop of Buenos Aires, Francis endorsed civil unions for gay couples as an alternative to same-sex marriages.
What we have to have is a civil union law that way they are legally covered.” “You can’t kick someone out of a family, nor make their life miserable for this. They are children of God,” Francis said in one of his sit-down interviews for the film. “Homosexual people have the right to be in a family. The film, which features fresh interviews with the pope, delves into issues Francis cares about most, including the environment, poverty, migration, racial and income inequality, and the people most affected by discrimination. The papal thumbs-up came midway through the feature-length documentary “Francesco,” which premiered at the Rome Film Festival. ROME – Pope Francis became the first pontiff to endorse same-sex civil unions in comments for a documentary that premiered Wednesday, sparking cheers from gay Catholics and demands for clarification from conservatives, given the Vatican’s official teaching on the issue. Watch Video: Pope Francis has endorsed same-sex civil unions for the first time
0 kommentar(er)
