When Hollywood Becomes The New Council

Cate Blanchett gives Leo XIV a UNHCR bracelet, Spike Lee hands him a Knicks jersey with “Leo 14” on the back, and the Vatican sells it as a Jubilee moment of “hope.” The guest list looked like Oscars night: Spike Lee, Blanchett, Judd Apatow, George Miller, Gus Van Sant, Abel Ferrara, Monica Bellucci, Viggo Mortensen, plus earlier audiences with De Niro and Pacino. The conspicuous absences, Gibson, Eastwood, Voight, Woods, were waved away.

Leo, a self-professed movie buff, told them cinema is “a workshop of hope,” “an art of the Spirit,” and that theaters are “the beating hearts of our communities.” When the lights go down, he said, people rediscover “a portion of the hope that is essential for humanity to live to the fullest.”

It sounds pious. It also sounds like a homily to a new magisterium.

What is not there? No call to conversion. No mention that the only lasting hope is supernatural: grace, the Cross, Our Lord. The “Spirit” here is emotion, not the Holy Ghost who judges the living and the dead. ---More...