Film on pope outshined by imbroglio at Vatican

Civil union quote puts Holy See in media bind

ROME — The world premiere of a documentary on Pope Francis was supposed to have been a bright spot for a papacy locked down by a pandemic and besieged by a corruption scandal, recalling Francis’ glory days traveling the world to bless the oppressed.

But the red carpet rollout of “Francesco” has been anything but bright, with evidence that the Vatican censored the pope last year by deleting his endorsement of same-sex civil unions from an interview, only to have the footage resurface in the new film.

Aside from the firestorm the remarks created, the “Francesco” fiasco has highlighted the Vatican’s often self-inflicted communications wounds and Francis’ willingness to push his own agenda, even at the expense of fueling pushback from conservative Catholics.

The kerfuffle began Wednesday with the world premiere of “Francesco,” a feature-length film on Francis and the issues he cares most about: climate change, refugees and social inequality. Midway through, Francis delivers the bombshell quote that gays deserve to be part of the family and that he supported civil unions to give them legal protections.

But the content of the pope’s words was almost lost in the controversy that ensued over their origin.

At first, film director Evgeny Afineevsky claimed that Francis made them directly to him. Then one of Francis’ media advisers said they came from a 2019 interview with Mexican broadcaster Televisa and were old news as a result.

Televisa confirmed the origin of the quotes but said they never aired. A source in Mexico said the Vatican, which used its own cameras to shoot the interview and provided raw footage to Televisa afterward, had deleted the civil union quote in question.

The Vatican has refused to comment and imposed something of a media blackout on the matter.

In 2018, Francis fired the first head of the office, Monsignor Dario Vigano, after he mischaracterized a private letter from retired Pope Benedict XVI, then had a photo of it digitally manipulated and sent out to the media.

In both cases, journalists, who must play by Vatican rules in accepting handout footage of events covered exclusively by Vatican cameras, were misled into assuming that the Holy See would abide by traditional journalistic ethics and provide them with unaltered images.

Coincidentally, it was Vigano who first entertained a pitch for a documentary on Francis by Afineevsky, who was nominated for an Oscar for his 2015 documentary “Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom,” which opened the Venice Film Festival that year.

After Vigano was ousted, his replacement, Paolo Ruffini, kept the line of communications open, as well as the doors to the Vatican television archives.

About midway through the film, Afineevsky recounts the story of Andrea Rubera, a married gay Catholic who wrote Francis asking for his advice about bringing into the church his three young children with his husband.

It was an anguished question, given that the Catholic Church teaches that gay people must be treated with dignity and respect but that homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered.” The church also holds that marriage is an indissoluble union between man and woman, and that as a result, gay marriage is unacceptable.

In the end, Rubera recounts how Francis urged him to approach his parish transparently and bring the children up in the faith, which he did. After the anecdote ends, the film cuts to Francis’ civil union comments in the Televisa interview.