Last month, Pope Leo XIV revealed his four favorite films. This can give us some insight into the shy new pontiff, who is still a bit of a mystery.

The oldest film with the papal bull of approval is 1946’s It’s a Wonderful Life, directed by Frank Capra. George Bailey, played by Jimmy Stewart, lives in Bedford Falls, a black-and-white Norman Rockwell painting. George is depicted as a lifelong do-gooder: as a child, he saves his brother Harry from drowning in a pond; George later forfeits his tuition money so that his brother may attend college; after marrying, George uses the money they had saved for their honeymoon to save a local bank from insolvency; and he defends the less affluent inhabitants of Bedford Falls against a gangster capitalist named Henry Potter.

One Christmas, George realizes that he’s had it with helping so many people over the years, which seems to have brought no tangible benefits and has kept him from fulfilling his dreams and leaving the Podunk town. Before he jumps off a bridge, George’s guardian angel, Clarence, shows him how much worse the world would have been without his kind actions.

It’s a Wonderful Life’s depiction of angels is more Hollywood fantasy than biblical theology. However, Clarence is to George not unlike what Raphael is to Tobit; Raphael means “God has healed,” and indeed God has healed George through Clarence and through the generous human kindness he experiences at the film’s end.

Leo also mentioned the 1965 musical The Sound of Music, directed by Robert Wise. In the unlikely case that you haven’t seen it, Julie Andrews plays Maria, an undisciplined novice at a convent in Salzburg, at the foot of the Austrian Alps. Because of her free-spirited nature, the nuns tell Maria she doesn’t have a vocation and suggest that she work as a governess to the seven children of the strict, widowed, retired naval Captain Georg von Trapp. Initially, the artistic Maria’s approach to raising the captain’s children clashes with von Trapp’s Das ist Disziplin attitude, but they end up falling in love and marrying.

Maria trains the von Trapp children to become singers and folk dancers. They achieve considerable success. But after Germany’s 1938 annexation of Austria, they are disturbed by the growing popularity of Nazism in their country. With the help of the nuns, the von Trapps escape to neutral Switzerland.

At a time when huge swaths of the world are descending into demographic winter amid anti-natalist propaganda, The Sound of Music shows that large families can be something beautiful and no hindrance to professional success. As divorce rates are skyrocketing, the film shows how two people with very different personalities can create a loving, successful marriage. And whereas most contemporary Hollywood depictions of priests and nuns emphasize depravity, the film shows religious sisters in a positive light. Also, The Sound of Music demonstrates that artists can be courageous and resist evil, unlike the protagonist of Hungarian director István Szabó’s aptly titled Mephisto, about a German actor who sells his soul to a devil named Hitler.

Next, Leo XIV listed Roberto Benigni’s 1997 film Life Is Beautiful among his favorites. He is not the first pontiff to do so; when the film was released in Italy in the late 1990s, Pope St. John Paul II was so impressed that he invited Benigni to the Vatican for a private screening.

In addition to directing and writing the screenplay for Life Is Beautiful, Benigni is also the film’s star. He plays Guido, a hyperactive butterfingers waiter turned bookseller; because he is Jewish, Guido is subjected to increasing discrimination in Fascist Italy. He eventually falls in love with the Gentile Dora (played by Benigni’s real-life wife, Nicoletta Braschi), with whom he has a son, Giosuè.

Guido tries to use his humor to protect the boy from the growing ugliness of the Fascist state. When Giosuè inquires about a shop window saying that dogs and Jews are not permitted, Guido tells him that Chinese and kangaroos are banned from other stores. This is a wise musing on the arbitrariness of ethnic prejudice. Trying to gauge Pope Leo XIV’s vision of the Church or stance on issues based on his favorite films would be going too far.Tweet This

Eventually, Guido and Giosuè are deported to a concentration camp. Although Dora is not Jewish, she insists on accompanying her family during this time of trial. At the camp, Guido tries to convince Giosuè that camp life is a game: those who win a thousand points will win a tank—and not a toy tank, like the one that Giosuè plays with, but a real one. When Giosuè says that children he had met in the camp have disappeared, Guido insists that they are hiding to beat him in the game. When Guido hears rumors that the camp’s showers are actually gas chambers, he encourages Giosuè’s dislike for bathtime and tells him to remain sporco (dirty) to win.

The surroundings and the fact that Americans, not Soviets, liberate the camp suggest that the site where Guido and his family end up is not Auschwitz-Birkenau, to which Italian-Jewish victims of the Holocaust were spirited away. Life Is Beautiful seems to trivialize the extreme suffering of millions of civilians at the hands of Hitler’s Germany; in reality, the starvation, backbreaking labor, mass executions, and fatal epidemics caused by awful sanitary conditions of any Nazi camp would make such a ruse as Guido’s last, at most, fifteen minutes. The depiction of the camp is shockingly sanitized; Guido gets on the camp intercom to tell his wife he loves her, yet this doesn’t end with a bullet in his head.

St. John Paul II came from Poland, the country that arguably suffered most at the hands of the Third Reich. Yet he apparently didn’t mind this inaccurate depiction. During his private screening, the pope said that Life Is Beautiful proves there were “saints even in places like Auschwitz.” Dora’s insistence on accompanying her family to the camp demonstrates that not even Hitler and Mussolini could break down family ties, while her brave gesture and Guido’s fight to protect and save his son likely reminded him of acts of kindness that indeed happened in the camp. 

John Paul II canonized St. Maximilian Kolbe, the Polish Franciscan who volunteered to die in the Auschwitz starvation cell to save another prisoner; he also certainly knew the story of Janusz Korczak, the popular Polish-Jewish physician, educator, author, and orphanage director who turned down many offers to hide outside the Warsaw Ghetto, instead choosing to accompany his orphans at the time of their deaths in Treblinka, much like Benigni’s Dora stood by her husband and son and volunteered to go to the camp.

Of Leo’s favorite films, 1980’s Ordinary People, directed by Robert Redford and a winner of the Best Picture Oscar, is the least uplifting. Set in the wealthy, white suburbs of the pope’s native Chicago, Ordinary People is light years away from the quirkiness of John Hughes many Chicago-set comedies.

The film’s performances are first-rate. Donald Sutherland plays Calvin Jarrett, a successful tax attorney, while Mary Tyler Moore is Beth, his cold wife. Perhaps to symbolically emphasize that wealth doesn’t free one from suffering, their older son Buck drowns during a yacht accident. To make matters worse, their other son, Conrad, attempts suicide and spends time in a psychiatric hospital.

The film is an excellent character study. Timothy Hutton is fine as Conrad, while Judd Hirsch delivers a strong performance as his sympathetic shrink. Conrad tells his girlfriend that he doesn’t believe in God, but that only makes his tormented life seem even more meaningless.

In a post-Amoris Laetitia environment, it would be tempting to interpret Pope Leo’s endorsement of Ordinary People as a stance on the controversy. Indeed, the film ends in a divorce. “I don’t know if I love you anymore,” Calvin tells Beth, echoing Annie Hall’s sad observation that “love fades.” Yet this is not an affirmation of this decision; Ordinary People is far from moralistic. Rather, the film shows the fate of ordinary people ripped apart by tragedy. Calvin and Beth’s implied separation is not celebrated; Calvin tells his wife that “I don’t know what I’m going to do without [his lost love for Beth].” Perhaps, as a shepherd, Leo was moved by this depiction of people who need spiritual help.

Trying to gauge Pope Leo XIV’s vision of the Church or stance on issues based on his favorite films would be going too far. However, his artistic tastes do reveal to us something about his sensitivities. The good news is that many of his favorite films celebrate life, family, and resistance to evil and expose the emptiness of an existence without God.