I have never subscribed to most film critics’ notion that Godfather 3 turned out to be a disastrous way of capping Francis Ford Coppola’s Oscar Awards-hogging series on the rise and fall of the Corleone Italian mafia clan.
Redemption — no matter how superficial the manner it was sought by the original godfather, Don Vito Corleone played by Marlon Brando, and successor-son Michael — had been well-sewn into the fabric of the Godfather trilogy.
From where I’ve sat rewatching Godfathers 1, 2, and 3 many times over, the series-ender in the 1990s more than lived up to the original novel’s theme of money and power being used with little success to wipe the blood off the crime family’s history.
What’s not to like about Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone trying in vain to gain societal acceptance and, laughably absurd, a veneer of integrity, through the buy-in rescue of a debt-ridden Vatican Bank as its new majority shareholder?
Throw in the shadowy figures behind the walls of the Vatican in Rome conspiring to assassinate a pope, whose “sin” was to preside over a hopelessly corrupt church willing to serve as a laundromat to the Corleone family’s dirty money, and you have a celluloid winner.
Life can be stranger or – as we try to get out of a pandemic – as strange as fiction, at least, in this day and age, of the two popes and the Vatican once again hugging the news for all the wrong reasons.
Our own Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, touted just years back as being of pope material as the toast of the Vatican, had been, to the chagrin of Filipinos, unceremoniously dismissed by Pope Francis himself as head of the church’s charity organization Caritas.
Church politics at play?
Of small consolation was that Tagle, who had been heading Caritas for over half a decade now, was allowed by the sickly Pope to preside over announcing the heads of the Caritas transition team. The brouhaha, Vatican apologists were quick to assert, does not reek of plunder, sex, and anything Bacchanalian.
Just some ruffled feathers, bruised egos, and grassroots morale that have to be smoothened out and assuaged, the Vatican defenders claimed. Okay, if they say so, as we’re not going to start conjuring something like Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons here.
Still, in reel or real life, it’s always the twists and turns of the narrative that make for good reading or watching as characters unravel, the hero quickly becoming the goat, or the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse making an End of Days-ish trumpet-signaled triumphant entrance.
On top of the Caritas fiasco, there’s this ongoing case before the Vatican court, of defendant Cardinal Angelo Becciu calling Pope Francis on 24 July 2021 to ask the pontiff to confirm that he authorized the payment of ransom for a kidnapped nun in Africa.
While there may be nothing wrong with paying the bandits off to release a poor nun, the call between Cardinal Becciu and the Pope was recorded and the transcript was made public by the Italian news agency Adnkronos.
That Becciu needled the Pope and probably sought a straight-from-the-horse’s-mouth exoneration, thus the recording was not surprising. After all, Becciu’s call for “redemption” to the pontiff came days before the Vatican started his trial for embezzlement.
Reports have it that at Becciu’s behest, a security consultant named Cecilia Marogna, facilitated the payment of 500,000 euros to the kidnappers holding the nun since 2017 and 350,000 euros to a British firm that acted as a middleman in the ransom payment.
Sacked by Pope Francis two years ago, Becciu has maintained that all Church funds released by him had the blessing of the pontiff and that he was, sort of, just being a good soldier to God’s representative on earth.
The ethics of the Pope giving his blessing for the ransom payment, if indeed it was given to the disgraced Cardinal, is something between him and Vatican regulations — even if the Pope is seen as beyond the ambit of church regulators.
Why not pay ransom for a nun when the Vatican has been pilloried, as well, for the purchase of a luxury London property in a transaction also tainted by the indictment of 10 people for fraud and extortion?
Tellingly, the call, which came just 10 days after the Pope was released following intestinal surgery, had the pontiff saying he vaguely remembered the conversation between him and the cardinal.
Whether due to health reasons or yet another Vatican controversy, the dawning of an era of three and not just two popes may be on the horizon. Pray not?