Pope Francis Signs with Netflix

In the Vatican, they don't hold a grudge. Unless they have amnesia: in December 2019, the Netflix platform broadcast a short film entitled The First Temptation of Christ, in which the Son of God was misrepresented as a homosexual. Nearly eight hundred thousand people signed an online petition to protest the scandalous staging at the time.

A few weeks later, Netflix persisted in broadcasting, on December 20, 2019, The Two Popes, a television film maintaining a damaging vagueness between fiction and reality, on the relationship between Benedict XVI and the one who was then Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio.

But the water has been flowing swiftly under the bridges, beyond the Tiber, and, barely a year later, the media are relaying the astonishing news of September 16, 2020: “Pope Francis has a project with Netflix!”

The American online audiovisual giant plans to adapt Sharing the Wisdom of Time, a book by Jesuit Antonio Spadaro, published in 2018: the work has been prefaced by the successor of Peter himself,—a rare privilege—who therein exposed a “synthesis of his thoughts on the link between the young and the old,” Vatican News explained at the time.

And so, the television adaptation will be divided into four parts, each one highlighting men and women over seventy. “The elders interviewed in the book come from a variety of countries, religions, ethnicities, and socio-economic backgrounds. They will be interviewed by young filmmakers living in their own countries, and the pope will give commentary.”

Pope Francis will also be present in this series, through an exclusive interview that will expose his “unique point of view,” as the Netflix announcement, on the world and its time—should we fear the worst ?

We'll have to wait until next year to find out, as Netflix plans to launch its documentary series in 2021.