Names and faces
Pope Francis has once again used a Christmas greeting to dress down Vatican colleagues, denouncing the “cancer” of cliques and how bureaucrats can become “corrupted” by ambition and vanity. “Reforming Rome is like cleaning the Egyptian sphinxes with a toothbrush,” Francis told cardinals, bishops and priests who work for him on Thursday. “You need patience, dedication and delicacy.” Francis has a tradition of giving the Curia a tough-love Christmas greeting, inviting the Vatican bureaucrats who help govern the 1.2-billion Catholic Church to a Jesuit-style examination of conscience before the new year. On Thursday, Francis spent a good chunk of his remarks on in-house business, making reference to a number of controversial and mysterious exits of Vatican officials in 2017 that once again raised questions about his ability to reform. While Francis acknowledged that there were plenty of competent, loyal and even saintly people who work in the Holy See, he also said there were others chosen to help him reform the Vatican’s inefficient and outdated bureaucracy who had shown themselves not to be up to the task. When these people are then “delicately” removed, Francis said “they falsely declare themselves martyrs of the system, of an ‘uninformed pope’ or the ‘old guard,’ when in fact they should have done a mea culpa.”
Actor Willem Dafoe came into The Florida
Project
ready to be transformed, and he says working in a cheap motel helped him get there. Dafoe, 62, received nominations from the Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild Awards last week for his performance as the kindhearted, fatherly manager of the Magic Castle hotel in the Sean Baker film. The two-time Oscar nominee said filming at a real hotel that houses homeless families like the one at the heart of the film changed his perspective as a performer. He said it opened him up and taught him things that he could “apply to the pretending.” Immersive and real settings, allow him to connect more deeply with his characters, he said. He just finished playing Vincent van Gogh in Julian Schnabel’s At Eternity’s
Gate, which was shot in various European locations where the artist spent time. “When you do that, you can’t help but, with a little imagination, feel his presence there; or imagine that that tree, that old big tree that is 200 years old, was in his presence and now you’re in its presence and there’s some sort of connection,” Dafoe said. Despite his long career, Dafoe said he interprets awards recognition as a sign that he should continue working. He said acting is always an uncertain business and “it helps to be encouraged.”