An excellent guide to the Vatican film list

What movies do you think best encapsulate Catholic themes or ideas? What favorite movies of yours do you think effectively represent an important aspect of Catholic teaching? Buy me a beer and I’ll be happy to give you my own list.

Or, alternatively, you could consult Rome herself. In 1995, a Vatican-appointed commission marked the one-hundredth anniversary of the birth of cinema in Paris by offering their appreciative list of forty-five films they assessed either taught Catholic truths or dialogue on important moral messages. Popcorn with the Pope: A Guide to the Vatican Film List by David Paul Baird, Andrew Petiprin, and Michael Ward not only offers a welcome introduction to that list but also an extended, helpful commentary to best appreciate it.

Rome’s complicated relationship with the film industry

The Catholic Church took a while to warm up to cinema, though as early as 1896, Pope Leo XII offered a blessing into a movie camera. It was the first time a pontiff would appear on screen. Yet most early papal commentary on film was decidedly negative. Pope Pius XI in his 1929 encyclical Divini Illius Magistri derided popular desire for cinematic diversions as similar to “the passion for the shows of the circus which possessed even some Christians” during the early centuries of the Church.

Pius XI in the 1936 encyclical Vigilanti Cura criticized the film industry’s unwillingness to police its own content, while praising the Legion of Decency, which offered religiously informed moral judgment on American films. Over the years, the movies falling under the condemnation of that organization would include Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns, as well as Hitchcock’s Psycho and The Exorcist, based on a book by practicing Catholic William Peter Blatty. Even Miracle on 34th Street, curiously, came in for censure. Of course, these movies seem incredibly tame when compared to the irredeemable garbage that moviegoers routinely consume now.

It wasn’t all finger-wagging from the Vatican. Pius XII in a 1955 apostolic exhortation offered guidelines for cinema, including the presence of such principles as “respect for man” and “loving understanding.” Nor should it be a surprise that it was under the pontificate of St. John Paul II, himself a respected playwright, that an approved film list would appear.

An expectedly serious and intellectual movie catalog

Baird, Petiprin, and Ward explain that the films chosen for this list “reflect the sensibilities of critics of a certain frame of mind, who hail from a specific part of the world and belong to a particular generation.” Thus, for example, many of the movies are decidedly tragic. About twenty percent of them are Italian. And almost twenty percent of them deal with either the First or Second World Wars. Because of this, the movies generally “ask more from viewers than the average big-budget cineplex or new release on Netflix.”

For many, the seriousness of this list could be a deterrent. Yet, as the authors note, we have been raised almost exclusively on cinematic junk food, whereas the Vatican Film List offers an “exotic taster menu” in the experiences, feelings, and opinions of humanity in all of its raw pain and emotion. These are difficult movies, but they are compelling. Popcorn with the Pope offers an introductory taste to them, giving the viewer the relevant historical context and a brief theological reading of each movie, as well as some questions for further reflection.

In Beauty and Imagination: A Philosophical Reflection on the Arts, Christendom College professor of philosophy Daniel McInerny argues that art’s function is to move the audience via a cognitive or intelligible delight inherent in beauty, and through that process incline our sensible and rational appetites to “moral transformation.” Art is attractive to us precisely for this reason: it invites the viewer (or listener) to perceive the intelligible in the sensible, and by extension realize a deeper insight while not leaving the sensible behind. This is accomplished via mimesis, which, though caricatured as mindless copying, is rather an interpretation of nature that seeks to draw out the deeper realities and truths therein. Thus, for example, Mona Lisa speaks to us not because it is identical to its human subject, but because Leonardo da Vinci succeeds in drawing out his subjects’ deeper personhood in a way that brings to her life on the canvas.

Unfortunately, modern art, including cinema, often rejects this imitative approach in favor of an interpretive and communicative process that is aimed either at gratifying our baser, narcissistic desires, or expressing a hopeless meaninglessness regarding the human condition. This is why so much modern art (and film) is either pornographic, or intellectually and morally vapid. We do not seek to engage with deeper truths, because our culture no longer believes in them, or can only handle the most simplistic renditions of them (Marvel, anyone?). This might also explain why we have become so taken with stories in which villains are depicted as either misunderstood or even heroic—if we no longer believe in objective good and evil, who are we to say the wicked witch or evil stepmother is really all that bad?

In contrast to this modern nihilism, the authors offer four guiding principles for engaging with these forty-five movies. The first is to understand the films as studies in humanity, reflections on God’s wonderful creation as represented in the diversity of human experiences. The second is to watch these films as an exercise in compassion, developing our sympathies with others and their unique sufferings. Alternatively, these movies can generate conversations based on shared experience that facilitate friendship and deeper conversations about spiritual truths.

Finally, the films require a certain degree of imagination, which is itself an important human activity that can, properly formed, direct us toward transcendence. None of us, for example, have experienced heaven, so we can only imagine it based on what we know from revelation and Church doctrine.

An estimable list for true leisure

Though perhaps pace the intent of the authors of Popcorn with the Pope, I would recommend abstaining from reading their reflections on the films until after watching them. Though their analysis is often engaging and excellent, I am of the mind that it is first best to interact with art on one’s own terms, to make the attempt to experience it for oneself before being lectured on its deeper meaning by the experts. Of course, one then can revisit the art. This is not at all to minimize the perspectives offered by Baird, Petiprin, and Ward’s, which, even for the films I knew well, were filled with interesting contextual details.

As far as the list itself goes, I’ll admit that there are some selections I will probably never watch—even for someone willing to put up with slow plots, some of these movies, such as Intolerance (1916) or The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) seem more like art to digest in an undergraduate film class than on a Saturday evening on my couch. There are also many gems I would hope many Catholics would already know, such as A Man For All Seasons, The Mission, Chariots of Fire, or Schindler’s List. I was also surprised and saddened to not see other films I figured would surely elicit praise from the Vatican, such as Franco Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth (1977) or something by celebrated French Catholic director Éric Rohmer.

It’s no doubt fun to contemplate what other films might warrant being on such a catalog of “Catholic” cinema. There isn’t a single Shakespearean adaptation on the list — surely something by Kenneth Branagh, such as Henry V or Hamlet, is worthy of consideration. What about modern war films, such as Glory, Saving Private Ryan, Master & Commander, or Dunkirk? Perhaps the authors could collaborate on their own list of forty-five recommended films they believe in some beautiful way exemplify a greater truth about nature or humanity. Certainly the cinematic expertise they demonstrate in writing Popcorn with the Pope would help us navigate the increasingly treacherous waters that are modern television and cinema.

Popcorn with the Pope: A Guide to the Vatican Film List
by David Paul Baird, Andrew Petiprin, Fr. Michael Ward
Word on Fire, 2023
Paperback, 416 pages