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  • New Zealand Listener

    HIS PONTIFF WHAT-IF

    Dec 15, 2019 6 minutes
    by RUSSELL BAILLIE
    illustration by WEEF

    At the end of The Two Popes – that’s the book he wrote, not his same-named film or play from his multimedia papal trinity – Anthony McCarten addresses his holiness directly. “Francesco,” he implores, “rebuild my church.”

    It’s the resounding last line in an epilogue in which the New Zealand writer opines on the state of the 2000-year-old institution and draws his own conclusions on why Pope Benedict XVI resigned in 2013 to be replaced by Pope Francis.

    It’s also a sign that for the New Zealand novelist, playwright and screenwriter, now best known for his hat-trick of Oscar-winning hit biopics about Stephen Hawking, Winston Churchill and Freddie Mercury, this project is as much personal as ecclesiastical.

    “Yeah, it is,” he says, down the line from Argentina a few hours before the movie premieres in Buenos Aires, the city where Pope Francis was born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in 1936.

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