Why Is The Vatican Coveting Celebrity?

Monday, 24 November 2025, 11:43 am
Opinion: Martin LeFevre - Meditations

In a perfect alignment of fading stars and dying religion, Hollywood stars have been invited to the Vatican in hopes that some celebrity luster can rub off on a monochrome American pope.

As one papal promoter put it, “Could our American pope be soft-launching plans for a collaboration between the Vatican and Hollywood?” Yes indeed, Pope Leo’s Hollywood overtures are “aimed at giving some star power to the pontiff, who is the first US pope in the history of the Catholic Church.” God help us.

Pope Leo, after summoning a number of stars to the Vatican, said film had evolved into “an expression of the desire to contemplate and understand life, to recount its greatness and fragility and to portray the longing for infinity.” The longing for infinity? That’s going a galaxy too far.

The global media is desperate to sell hope and moral leadership in a world gone to hell. Even the Guardian is cheering on the papal schlock. It features a “lapsed Catholic” saying, “Leo has demonstrated the benefits an American bishop of Rome can have for the rest of us, Christian, Catholic or otherwise: that is through his exemplary cultural leadership, and close engagement with the arts.”

Is there even a kernel of truth in that hype and hyperbole?

Another regular Guardian columnist goes further, and attains a fever pitch of desperation: “What the US urgently needs now, metaphorically speaking, is a national champion, a sort of modern-day Saint George to slay the dragon, save the people and ensure the triumph of good over evil. Who, in reality, might fill this role of moral savior? Leo has the moral authority, political savvy and international standing to confront Trump.”

Egad that’s bad.

A third writer in the Guardian’s recent trinity of pieces on Catholicism and Christianity expresses shock at how evangelical Christianity morphed into Christian nationalism: “The idea that Jesus can be invoked to justify cutting off aid to foreign countries and bundling immigrants into the back of unmarked vans is repulsive to me, but also mystifying – as if gravity suddenly pulled objects upward.”

Clearly, he hasn’t been paying attention, as few on the left have been paying attention. They ceded the spiritual dimension to a decaying Christianity, and watched as Trump was turned into the Second Coming.

As a progressive newspaper anxiously tries to restore liberal Catholic and moderate Christian relevance in an authoritarian political climate, one might ask, what happened to the separation between church and journalism?

Seriously, Pope Leo and the American bishop’s rhetoric will make about the same difference in halting Trump’s evils regarding immigration and civil rights as the verbiage coming out of Cop30 will in halting global warming.

With unintended understatement bordering on hilarity, the papal audience, which has included Cate Blanchett, Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino, is described as “the perfect opportunity for great photos and positivity from the Vatican to hit the world’s press, which beyond the Catholic media tends to focus on church scandals.”

Ah yes, the poor, put-upon Catholic Church, maligned for providing context and cover for malevolent priests to sexually abuse children for decades and centuries.

The last time I was in church was for my mother’s funeral. I had a queasy feeling about the priest, who had the smarmy vibe that many celibate priests possess. Sure enough, a few years later the pedo was exposed and charged.

Let’s suppose the Second Coming is real, and that Jesus incarnates at this possibly final crossroads for humanity. What’s one of the first things he would do? He would disavow any connection with the Roman Catholic Church formed in his name and encrusted with two millennia of shame.

The Church has been playing footsie with power ever since Constantine co-opted and configured the Roman Catholic Church in 325 at the Council of Nicaea, which the Vatican is celebrating the 1700th anniversary of this year.

Rampant international child abuse and cover-ups would be more than enough. But those “sins of the Church,” plus cozying up to power and the cosseting of wealth aren’t just “the human side of the Church,” as Catholic popes and bishops repeat ad nauseam. They are proof that the RCC has about as much to do with true religiosity as the CIA.

Pope Leo has been in the role for just over six months and is considered to be “a more mild-mannered, low-key operator than his charismatic but often divisive predecessor, the late Pope Francis.”

As one of his Vatican image-makers put it, “Leo is a listener, very quiet and modest, which has its own charm. But he is also a product that has to be created.”

Trafficking in images, much less brands and products, is a silly thing to do even for actors. It’s beyond absurd in a supposed religious leader.

Growing up in a Latinate Catholic parish, where as children we were compelled to attend Mass before school as well as mortal-sin-if-you-miss Sundays, I witnessed extreme violence (by a nun no less), and extreme hypocrisy (though no pedophilia) by priests.

Now, as the Vatican tries to fit into the Procrustean bed of the digital age, it’s telling, and revealing, how much the mentality of the market, with its credo of “branding,” has seeped into papism.

The Vatican got to work on Leo’s image immediately after his election in May. Within days, Leo, a passionate tennis player, welcomed the Italian world No 1, Jannik Sinner, to the Vatican. You can’t make this stuff up.

As the “lapsed Catholic” commentator approvingly noted, “It was reported this week that New Yorkers are turning to the church, with priests saying that there are soaring numbers of Catholic converts. The idea is that in a world of chaos and polarization, where everything seems to be falling apart, faith and its ceremonies are providing a sense of balance, calm and clarity amid the storm.”

That just guarantees that the global storm of chaos is only going to intensify, since Catholicism and the spinoffs of Protestantism, as opposed to genuine religiosity, provided the foundation for western civilization, which is now collapsing around and upon all of us.

It makes me cringe to hear a progressive environmentalist and activist say, “Having lost for now the cross, I am not eager to surrender the flag as well.” Christianity has been wrong about the cross from the beginning – Jesus did not “die for our sins;” he died, as Christ continues to die within, because we don’t face and fully own our mistakes.

And “surrender the flag,” when they’re just pieces of cloth symbolizing nationalism dressed up as patriotism?

As a recovering Catholic, I question the crumbling cornerstone of Catholicism. Did Jesus actually install the first pope when he allegedly said, “Peter, upon this rock I build my church?”

It just doesn’t fit with this mystic’s understanding of Jesus at all. The quote is from Matthew, which is one of the four gospels out of many chosen to form the Biblical canon in an alliance between emerging Christianity and the Roman Empire.

As far as the ludicrousness of Pope Leo “cooking up something to save Hollywood, as well as our souls,” there would not be popes and bishops, priests and ministers intermediating between the individual and universal Intelligence if people, then and now, actually listened to Jesus. He taught that only we can save our own souls. There would be gatherings, as he said, but not spiritual intermediaries.

At this point, in the digital age of the global religion of emerging AI, we are overwhelmed by history and scale. But history has lost its hold on our lives, while scale has become as irrelevant as the United States to the creation of a balanced global civilization.

True religiosity (or spirituality if you prefer) is synonymous with wholeness, not the false universality of Catholicism. It begins and ends within self-knowing individuals (the antithesis of individualism), and entails taking total responsibility for oneself as an inseparable microcosm of humanity.

A truly religious mind avoids organized religion like the plague. For as the old joke goes: A man spends 20 years searching for the truth, and when he finally discovers it, the devil comes along and says, “Here, let me help you organize it.”

Martin LeFevre

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Martin LeFevre - Meditations

Scoop Contributor

Martin LeFevre is a contemplative and philosopher.

His sui generis “Meditations” explore spiritual, philosophical and political questions relating to the polycrisis facing humanity.

lefevremartin77@gmail