Pope Leo meets with film stars and directors at Vatican

The Pope met with movie stars and directors astatine a peculiar Vatican assemblage to observe cinema.

Welcoming dozens of Hollywood icons - including Spike Lee, Cate Blanchett, and Greta Gerwig, among others - to an assemblage hall, Leo XIV called movie "a fashionable creation successful the noblest sense, intended for and accessible to all".

The Vatican's civilization ministry organised the juncture arsenic portion of its efforts to scope retired to the secular world.

"When cinema is authentic, it does not simply console, but challenges," the Pope, who was elected earlier this year aft the decease of Pope Francis, told those successful attendance.

"It articulates the questions that dwell wrong us, and sometimes, adjacent provokes tears that we didn't cognize we needed to shed."

Lee, champion known for directing 1989's Do The Right Thing, told reporters that "it was a astonishment to maine that I adjacent got invited", and talented the pontiff a New York Knicks hoops jersey.

Blanchett besides said that the Pope's comments were inspiring, adding: "Filmmaking is astir entertainment, but it's astir including voices that are often marginalised and not shy distant from the symptom and complexity that we're each surviving done close now."

Archbishop Paul Tighe, the lawman astatine the Vatican's civilization ministry, said the impermanent database was enactment unneurotic implicit the past 3 months with the assistance of a fistful of Hollywood contacts, including Martin Scorsese.

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Mr Tighe admitted that the Vatican had to person Hollywood agents that the invitation to travel conscionable Leo wasn't a hoax.

"It's an manufacture wherever radical person their commitments months successful beforehand and years successful advance, truthful evidently it was a small deed and miss, but we're precise pleased and precise proud" by the turnout, helium said.

Earlier this month, the Pope shared his apical 4 favourite movies: 1946's It's a Wonderful Life, 1965's The Sound of Music, 1980's Ordinary People, and 1997's Life Is Beautiful.