Celebrities who've met Popes throughout history
Martin Scorsese announces new film about Jesus after meeting Pope Francis
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CELEBRITY Pontiff
In 1967, the inaugural session of World Communications Day took place at the Vatican, in Rome. Established by Pope Paul VI as an annual celebration that encourages people to reflect on the opportunities and challenges that the modern means of social communication (the press, motions pictures, radio, television, and the Internet) afford the Church to communicate the gospel message, the initiative effectively ushered in the era of the celebrity-pontiff audience. The message today has broadened to include issues surrounding climate change, Third World debt, global health care, education, and other social causes. But the image of a well-known personality being greeted by the Pope still serves as an especially powerful endorsement of that message.
Famed filmmaker Martin Scorsese met with Pope Francis on his post-Cannes tour of Italy, hot off the success of 'Killers of a Flower Moon,' and he's already planning his next moves–or, rather, movie. The director attended the conference titled “The Global Aesthetics of the Catholic Imagination” on May 27, after he and his wife had a brief private audience with the Pope at the Vatican, where he announced he is making a film about 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 announced, according to multiple reports. “And I’m about to start making it,” he added. Scorsese previously secured a private audience with Pope Francis in November 2016 during his visit to Rome to promote his film 'Silence' (2016), so this idea has likely been gestating for a while.
Click through this gallery for a past and present look at pontiffs meeting personalities.
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