We’ve seen plenty of crossover stars in the year’s biggest films already: Black Panther stars Chadwick Boseman and Danai Gurira are featured in Avengers: Infinity War. Infinity War’s Paul Bettany (Vision) has a big role in Solo: A Star Wars Story. Josh Brolin is doing double dastardly duty as both Thanos (in Infinity War) and Cable (in Deadpool 2).
Add to the list of double-dipping cinema stars? Pope Francis.
Beyond the Sun, a faith-based fictional story to be released sometime this year, features the pontiff playing himself. (The movie’s trailer was just released, and you can watch it below.)
But Francis has a much bigger role, naturally, in Pope Francis: A Man of His Word, playing in select theaters beginning today.
This documentary, directed by three-time Oscar nominee Wim Wenders, follows Francis over two years of his pontificate—peppering the pope with questions, traveling with him around the globe and, especially, giving the Christian leader a platform to talk.
“This is not a biographical movie,” the director says in the movie’s production notes. “It’s more like a biography of his ideas—it’s a film with him more than one about him.”
And the guy doesn’t pull any punches.
The movie makes a big deal about the name that Jorge Mario Bergoglio, cardinal of Buenos Aires, chose when he became pope. Francis of Assisi was a reformer who lived 800 years ago, was deeply connected to nature and believed that our actions are far more powerful than our words. “It is no use walking anywhere to preach unless our walking is our preaching,” the original Francis once said.
Pope Francis echoes that sense of action throughout the movie. He’s shown washing the feet of prisoners, as well as visiting sick and dying in Africa. When he goes to the Philippines to encourage believers who lost everything to a vicious hurricane, he simply comes to share their grief. “I don’t know what to say to you,” he says, “other [than] to keep silent.”
He returns again and again to that theme of eloquent silence—how, in our noisy world when we’re so busy talking, we’ve lost the ability to listen. He says that his namesake was an “apostle of the ear.”
But Francis isn’t silent all the time.
He’s deeply concerned with global poverty in A Man of His Word, calling it a “scandal.” He famously eschewed the Apostolic Palace for a modest two-room apartment, and he challenges his own Catholic leaders to consider whether some have grown too comfortable and too dependent on money. “A long as the Church is placing its faith in wealth, Jesus is not there,” he tells a group of frowning cardinals.
“We must all consider if we can’t become a bit poorer,” he says at one juncture. “How much I want a poor church for the poor,” he says at another.
Pope Francis, we see, is an environmentalist as well: His second encyclical was a 184-page statement on our role as stewards for God’s creation. “We are all responsible,” Francis says. “None of us can say I have nothing to do with this.”
When it comes to the issue of homosexuality, he says, simply and controversially, “Who am I to judge?”
Obviously, Francis makes plenty of statements many Christians of different denominations and traditions will disagree with. He’s a pope very different from what we’re used to. But while I may not agree with Francis on every theological point here, A Man of His Word still challenged me in the best of ways.
I’m an American Christian, and in many respects those two words are synonymous with comfort—unlike Christians in much of the rest of the world. I have secure housing. I don’t worry where my next meal will come from. Even though many American Christians are increasingly concerned about the erosion of religious freedom, as well as mockery of Christian beliefs in the media, we still don’t face the kinds of harsh persecution that many believers around the world experience every day. It’s easy to be Christian here. Not much is asked of us.
But Francis does ask something of us. He asks us to become a little poorer for the sake of the poor around us. He asks us to look at God’s creation and to ponder if we can do more to protect it. He travels to some of the world’s poorest, most difficult places to live and washes the feet of those who live there, and he suggests, gently, for us to follow his example.
We don’t have to agree with everything Francis says to see that his actions have merit. In A Man of His Word, Francis suggests that Christianity is at its most powerful, most persuasive when it stops talking and starts doing. And as part of a culture that loves to talk and tweet and post and pontificate, that’s radical indeed.
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