In May 2023, I joined a delegation of writers in Rome for a conference on the “Catholic Imagination.” The conference’s organizers arranged for a formal papal audience to be sandwiched between two days of lectures and panels, but Francis was running a fever the week we arrived, and it remained unclear up to the last minute whether we would actually meet him.
That morning brought word that he was well enough to carry out his day’s schedule. We lined up at the Porto Sant’Anna and passed through security into a back entrance to the Apostolic Palace. We walked down magnificent private hallways, identical to the public halls around them apart from the absence of chattering tourists, and arrived at our destination: a Raphael room filled with rows of wooden folding chairs.
After several minutes of anticipation, a side door opened. We stood while Francis emerged, leaning heavily on his cane. He moved slowly toward the elevated seat facing us at the front of the room. One couldn’t help feeling that he should have stayed in bed, notwithstanding the disappointment this decision would have caused. I wondered whether he might be having this thought himself. Then he stopped and turned. A broad, childlike smile appeared on his face. As he swerved from his path to head in our direction, I thought I saw concern on the expressions of the various Vatican officials in the room.
Eventually Francis arrived at the front row of chairs, where Martin Scorsese stood beside his wife, Helen Morris. Francis took Scorsese into a warm hug and whispered into his ear before leaning over to hug Morris, who is confined to a wheelchair with Parkinson’s. Finally he headed toward his own chair—moving, it seemed to me, with a bit more energy. He sat down to deliver his prepared remarks on the importance of artistic imagination to the spiritual life.
In those remarks, Francis spoke of teaching literature in his early days as a Jesuit. He mentioned his great love for Dostoevsky, expressing admiration for Dostoevsky’s depictions of “the contradictory nature of existence.” He urged us to act as the voice of human anxieties—what he called “the tensions of the soul”—and he warned us not to “domesticate” these anxieties, which he took to be one of the primary places where we encounter God.
After he’d finished, we lined up for our brief personal audiences. When my turn with Francis came, I told him that I had left the Church for much of my adulthood, that my years outside it had mostly been unhappy ones, and that his papacy had played an important part in leading me home. As I spoke, he turned his head, as though listening with care. When I’d finished, he took my hand and whispered a nearly inaudible “thank you” in reply. Then my time with him was done.
When I learned of Francis’s death, I naturally thought of the great difference he’d made in my life, and the gratitude I felt at having had the opportunity to express that difference to him. But my mind returned most insistently to the moment that preceded all that, when the head of the Catholic Church went off course to embrace the world’s most celebrated living filmmaker.
Francis was known to puncture the solemnity of formal occasions with spontaneous acts of joy. He made off-the-cuff jokes, some of which got him into trouble or had to be walked back by the Vatican’s press office. He didn’t stand on ceremony. This was among the many things about him that aggravated traditionalists, who (rightly enough) insisted that ceremony was a vital part of the job. But in this case, the act had brought a deeper meaning to the entire experience.
Meeting the pope would have been a joyous occasion for me even if I’d watched him struggle through the whole event. Perhaps the impression that he had pushed through physical infirmity to fulfill the obligations of the office would have increased my respect for him. But the contrary impression—that he wanted to be in that room, that he took real pleasure in it—increased instead my love.
Some of those same traditionalists might also have taken issue with the particular object of this spontaneous joy. In a room full of devout artists, many of them marginalized from mainstream audiences by their commitment to the Church, Francis had singled out the one real celebrity, a four-times-divorced lapsed Catholic with a mass following for films stuffed with profanity and violence. Viewed uncharitably, the gesture might even have confirmed the suspicion that Francis cared more about his standing in the secular world than he did about upholding Catholic orthodoxy.
My own response was quite different. My earliest awareness of Martin Scorsese’s work came in the mid-Eighties, when our parish priest announced from the pulpit that Catholics were not to watch his most recent film, The Last Temptation of Christ. I was used to being told that certain movies or books were not appropriate for kids my age, but this was the first suggestion I remember hearing that some works of art were just too dangerous to handle, even for adults. Even then, I bristled at the idea, and I suspect it contributed to my later habit of seeking out just those works.
As I grew into a serious reader, I found myself consistently drawn to works by writers with close but troubled relationships to Catholicism—James Joyce and Marcel Proust; Katherine Anne Porter and Robert Musil; William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon; Don DeLillo and Annie Dillard and Robert Stone. These writers—most of them cradle Catholics—took an irreverent tone toward the Church, and their irreverence sometimes approached the blasphemous. My exposure to them may have hastened my loss of faith, and in this sense the Church may well have been right to warn me against them. But in subsequent years their works helped keep me alive, and near enough to the Church to make my eventual return possible.
For it was just as Francis said: They did not allow me to escape or domesticate my anxiety, and this anxiety eventually pointed the way back to God. They showed me at once the beauty and the ugliness of the world. I now find myself asking how embattled and insecure a church must be to warn its members against engaging with them—and how humbly confident a church must be to take one of their creators into a joyful embrace.
This essay is part of a symposium on Pope Francis’s life and legacy. Read the rest here.
