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A host of Hollywood celebrities will meet Pope Leo on Saturday, a gathering Vatican observers say is aimed at giving some star power to the pontiff, who is the first US pope in the history of the Catholic church.
Cate Blanchett, Monica Bellucci, Chris Pine and Adam Scott are among the actors who will join a special audience with Leo at his Apostolic Palace residence, along with the Oscar-winning directors Spike Lee, George Miller and Gus Van Sant.
The Vatican said in a statement this week that the pope “has expressed his desire to deepen dialogue with the world of cinema … exploring the possibilities that artistic creativity offers to the mission of the church and the promotion of human values”.
Before the audience, the Chicago-born pontiff revealed his four favourite films: Robert Wise’s The Sound of Music, Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, Robert Redford’s Ordinary People and Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful.
The meeting is billed by the Vatican’s culture office as being connected to the jubilee of artists and the world of culture that has been part of the Catholic church’s holy year.
But commentators say it also about promoting Leo, who only last week hosted Robert De Niro, beyond the Catholic media as well as casting a positive light on the church.
Leo, 70, has been in the role for just over six months and is considered to be a more mild-mannered, low-key operator than his charismatic but often divisive predecessor, the late Pope Francis.
“Leo doesn’t have the same charisma as Francis, who was always giving catchy one-liners,” said Hendro Munsterman, the Vatican correspondent for the Dutch newspaper Nederlands Dagblad. “Leo is a listener, very quiet and modest, which has its own charm. But he is also a product that has to be created.”
The Vatican got to work on Leo’s image immediately after his election in May. Within days, Leo, a passionate tennis player, welcomed the Italian world No 1, Jannik Sinner, to the Vatican. In a video of the meeting, Sinner, 24, gave the pope a tennis racket before handing him a ball and asking him to play. Looking around the room, Leo joked: “Here we’ll break something. Best not to!”
In June, Leo hosted Al Pacino in a private audience and this week met the Italian singer Laura Pausini.
Munsterman said: “They began with sport and now it’s culture, especially as we are in a very visible culture of Netflix and films, etc. It is a way of getting this pope into contact with popular culture, and I think it’s smart.”
Severina Bartonitschek, the Vatican correspondent for KNA, a Catholic news agency in Germany, said such audiences were “not for fun” or “because the pope wants to meet some VIPs”.
“We’re talking about positive PR for both sides because also the actors need some attention from the media to get their next job,” she said, adding that if the pope wanted to “he could also establish a topic in his speech because it will get attention”.
Bartonitschek described the papal audience as the perfect opportunity for “great photos and positivity” from the Vatican to hit the world’s press, which beyond the Catholic media tends to focus on church scandals.
She added: “No one outside the Catholic bubble talks about the pope normally, and about Leo especially. Francis was easier to handle because he perhaps found it easier to [connect] to the secular world.”
But Francis, too, tapped the world of popular culture to spread his messages.
In June last year, he held an audience with more than 100 comedians, including Jimmy Fallon, Chris Rock, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Stephen Merchant, and urged them to use their powerful gift of humour to spread laughter “in the midst of so much gloomy news” while telling them that laughing at God “is not blasphemy”.
Francis also met plenty of Hollywood stars and other celebrities during his 12-year-papacy, including Leonardo DiCaprio, with whom he discussed environmental issues, Angelina Jolie and Bono. The Italian-American director Martin Scorsese also has close ties with the Catholic church and is making a film featuring conversations between himself and Francis, including the late pontiff’s final in-depth on-camera interview.
