A holy alliance that reformed the Church

For lovers of political high drama, Netflix docu-drama The Two Popes promises to be the most explosive viewing of the year. Sir Anthony Hopkins plays Pope Benedict XVI and Jonathan Pryce his successor, Pope Francis, in a twohour film that lays bare the machinations inside the Vatican.

Benedict had had a fraught relationship with Francis for many years before stepping down as Pope in 2013. At the root of their quarrel was the power struggle at the top of the Catholic Church – vicious infighting that harked back, in the words of one insider, to the time of the Borgias.

Hopkins admits he found the sheer length of his part daunting initially. ‘ My brain went on strike!’ he laughs. ‘There were so many lines to learn, and I had to learn a German accent, and speak some Italian and Latin. I said to my wife, “I can’t do it, I have to pull out.” But my agent talked to the studio and they said, “It’s OK, we’ve got time.” So we put it off for a bit and I spent my time off learning my lines!’

The Vatican’s civil service,

the Curia, is notorious for the politicking of its middle-ranking officials. When Benedict was elected Pope, following the death of John Paul II in 2005, he discovered that warring factions in the Vatican court were out of control. He knew he was not the man to sort it out… but he thought he knew the person who could.

Benedict, born Joseph Ratzinger, was ordained as a priest in his native Bavaria in 1951. He was a cerebral figure, and by the mid80s was viewed as the leading intellectual in the Church. But when it came to purging the Vatican of its rancid office politics, he had no idea where to start. As one insider remarked, ‘His idea of hell would be to be sent on a one-week management-training seminar.’

Instead he asked Argentina’s senior churchman, the streetwise Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, to serve as his secretary of state,

his right-hand man, and clean up the corrupt Curia. Bergoglio turned him down.

One Argentinian priest said the Pope wanted a reformer ‘with the nails of a guitar player’ – meaning the secretary of state would need long nails like talons to engage in the bloody work that cleaning up the Vatican would involve.

For anyone not versed in Vatican politics, it all seems extraordinary. The Pope, after all, is a figurehead of love and light. But it’s the dark side that Hopkins and Pryce must attempt to convey – and there could not be two actors better suited to the roles. Hopkins is best known for blockbuster films such as The Silence Of The Lambs, in which he played serial killer Hannibal Lecter; Pryce’s magisterial TV roles have included Cardinal Wolsey in Wolf Hall.

Both men are also revered for their Shakespearean stage work, and they’ll need all their experience in power-politic plays such as King Lear to do justice to the Vatican story. When Bergoglio had turned down the chance to cleanse the Curia in 2005, he’d said the work would be the death of him. But when he became Pope himself, he began the work in earnest. As Pope Francis, he finally had the authority to get the job done. Labelling the Curia ‘narcissistic’, he said, ‘The court is the leprosy of the papacy.’ How these two men set about curing the church of its sickness will make fascinating television.

Netflix, coming soon

Anthony Hopkins as Benedict (left) and Jonathan Pryce as Francis