Martin Scorsese is remembering the late Pope Francis. The Catholic Church leader died on Easter at age 88. Scorsese, whose features iconically capture the influence of Roman Catholicism on both Italian-Americans and the scripture as a whole, shared a statement with IndieWire as a tribute to the Pope.
“There is so much that can be said about the significance of Pope Francis and everything he meant to the world, to the church, to the papacy. I will leave that to others,” Scorsese said. “He was, in every way, a remarkable human being. He acknowledged his own failings. He radiated wisdom. He radiated goodness. He had an ironclad commitment to the good. He knew in his soul that ignorance was a terrible plague on humanity. So he never stopped learning. And he never stopped enlightening. And, he embraced, preached and practiced forgiveness. Universal and constant forgiveness.”
“The Last Temptation of Christ” auteur continued, “The loss for me runs deep — I was lucky enough to know him, and I will miss his presence and his warmth. The loss for the world is immense. But he left a light behind, and it can never be extinguished.”
Scorsese had famously met with Pope Francis following the Global Aesthetics of the Catholic Imagination in May 2023, leading him to adapt the script for “A Life of Jesus.”
“I have responded to the pope’s appeal to artists in the only way I know how: by imagining and writing a screenplay for a film about Jesus,” Scorsese said at the time, adding to the Los Angeles Times that the expected 80-minute film would be about “trying to find a new way to make it more accessible and take away the negative onus of what has been associated with organized religion.”
Scorsese said, “Right now, ‘religion,’ you say that word and everyone is up in arms because it’s failed in so many ways. But that doesn’t mean necessarily that the initial impulse was wrong. Let’s get back. Let’s just think about it. You may reject it. But it might make a difference in how you live your life — even in rejecting it. Don’t dismiss it offhand. That’s all I’m talking about. And I’m saying that as a person who’s going to be 81 in a couple of days.”
He added of the common thread between his filmography, “I tried finding with ‘Kundun’ and ‘The Last Temptation of Christ,’ even ‘Gangs of New York,’ to a certain extent, ways into redemption and the human condition and how we deal with the negative things inside us. Are we decent and then learn to become indecent? Can we change? Will others accept that change? And it really is, I think, a fear of a society and culture that’s corrupted because of its lack of grounding in morality and spirituality. Not religion. Spirituality. Denying that. So for me, it’s finding my own way in a … if you want to say the term ‘religious’ sense, but I hate to use that language, because it’s misinterpreted often. But there’s basic fundamental beliefs that I have — or I’m trying to have — and I’m using these films to find it.”
