Director: Fernando Meirelles
Length: 2 hours 5 minutes

Six-Sentence Synopsis

The Two Popes (2019) dramatises a series of imagined private conversations between the conservative Pope Benedict XVI and the progressive Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, set against the backdrop of the Catholic Church’s crisis of confidence in the early 2010s. Bergoglio travels to Rome intending to submit his resignation to the Pope, having grown disillusioned with the direction of the Church, but instead finds himself drawn into a surprising and candid dialogue with a man who appears to be his theological opposite. Through their conversations, the film contrasts two deeply different visions of what the Church is and what it should become, with Benedict representing tradition, doctrinal rigidity, and withdrawal from the world, and Bergoglio representing reform, pastoral warmth, and engagement with the margins of society. Woven into the dialogue are flashbacks to Bergoglio’s youth in Argentina, exploring his personal formation, his complicated conduct during the military dictatorship of the 1970s, and the guilt and spiritual reckoning that have shaped him. As their conversations deepen, mutual respect and even affection grow between the two men, and Benedict gradually reveals that he is considering an unprecedented step, his resignation from the papacy, and that he believes Bergoglio may be the man God is calling to succeed him. The film ends with Benedict’s resignation in 2013 and the election of Bergoglio as Pope Francis, framing the transition not as a rupture but as a form of providential continuity, with the Church finding a way to hold together its past and its future.

Doctrinal Dissection – ‘Vocation’

The Church teaches that vocation is not self-chosen but divinely ordained, rooted in what the Catechism describes as the universal call to holiness: God’s invitation to every human person to a life of union with himself as their ultimate end. This universal call takes particular shape in the specific vocations to marriage, the priesthood, consecrated life, or single life in the world, each understood as a distinct but equally valid path toward the same destination, carrying its own gifts, demands, and responsibilities. Scripture grounds this teaching firmly in Jeremiah 1:5, where God declares that he knew and consecrated the prophet before he was even formed in the womb, establishing that vocation is always a prior divine initiative rather than a human ambition or personal preference. Saint Paul deepens this in his first letter to the Corinthians, reminding the early Church that the Holy Spirit distributes different callings and gifts according to God’s will rather than human choice, so that the whole Body of Christ might be built up through the complementary contributions of each of its members. Saint John Henry Newman, who understood the weight of vocation from his own dramatic experience of conversion and calling, captured its personal urgency when he wrote that God has committed some definite service to every person that no other can fulfil, making the faithful discernment and living out of one’s vocation not merely a private spiritual matter but a genuine obligation to God, to the Church, and to the world. In The Two Popes (2019), vocation is explored not as a settled state but as a living and costly question, examined through the lens of papal resignation, the formative wounds of conscience revealed in flashback, and the tension between a Church called simultaneously to preserve and to renew.

Meirelles places the question of vocation at the very centre of The Two Popes (2019) by dramatising one of the most theologically extraordinary events in modern Church history: the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI. For a Pope to resign is not merely an institutional decision but a profound vocational one, and the film treats it as such, showing Benedict wrestling with whether his call to the papacy is a permanent and unconditional one or whether God might be releasing him from it. The Catholic understanding of vocation is not static; it is a living relationship between the soul and God that must be continually discerned, and Meirelles uses Benedict’s resignation to dramatise exactly this, presenting it not as abdication or failure but as an act of radical obedience to a God whose call can take unexpected and even humbling forms. In doing so the film implicitly raises one of the most searching questions vocation can pose: whether faithfulness sometimes means relinquishing the role one has been given rather than clinging to it, and whether true humility before God’s will might look, to the world, like weakness.

Meirelles uses the film’s extended flashback sequences, tracing Jorge Bergoglio’s life in Argentina during the years of the military dictatorship, to explore how vocation is tested, wounded, and ultimately renewed by the movements of conscience. Bergoglio is shown as a man haunted by decisions made under extreme pressure, choices in which his institutional role and his moral instincts pulled in opposite directions, and the flashbacks present his vocation not as a smooth and untroubled calling but as something forged painfully through failure, guilt, and the slow work of repentance. This is deeply consistent with Catholic teaching on vocation, which holds that God does not call the perfect but calls and then forms, working through the whole of a person’s experience including their sins and their failures to shape them for the service he intends. Meirelles is at his most theologically perceptive here in suggesting that Bergoglio’s particular vocation as a pastor of mercy and tenderness was inseparable from his own experience of needing mercy, that conscience, when honestly examined and humbly submitted to God, becomes not a source of paralysis but the very instrument through which vocation is clarified and deepened.

Meirelles frames the film’s central dialogue between Benedict and Bergoglio not merely as a clash of personalities or ecclesiastical politics but as a profound meditation on how two men, each genuinely called by God, can understand that calling in fundamentally different ways. Benedict’s conservatism is presented not as rigidity but as a vocational conviction that the Church’s fidelity to tradition is itself a form of mercy toward a confused and rootless world, while Bergoglio’s instinct toward reform and encounter is shown as an equally sincere response to a God encountered most fully in the margins and peripheries of human life. The film’s great insight is that neither man is simply right or wrong, but that each embodies a legitimate and necessary dimension of the Church’s own vocation in the world, which must hold together continuity and renewal, doctrine and pastoral tenderness, without sacrificing one to the other. From a Catholic perspective Meirelles captures something genuinely important here: that the tension between conservation and progress within the Church is not a malfunction but a feature of an institution always straining to be faithful to a revelation given in the past while speaking to a world that never stops changing, and that vocation lived authentically will always feel that tension from the inside.