Director: Michael Anderson
Length: 2 hours 42 minutes

Six-Sentence Synopsis

The Shoes of the Fisherman (1968) opens with Kiril Lakota, a Ukrainian Catholic bishop, being released from twenty years of imprisonment in a Soviet labour camp as a quiet diplomatic gesture, arriving in Rome broken in body but unbroken in spirit. Brought into the College of Cardinals, he is a man utterly foreign to the corridors of Vatican power, carrying with him the simplicity and suffering of the persecuted Church rather than the sophistication of the institutional one. When the reigning Pope dies, the conclave turns in an unexpected direction and Lakota is elected to the Chair of Saint Peter, becoming the first non-Italian pope in centuries. He inherits a world on the brink of catastrophe: China, ravaged by famine, threatens war unless the international community responds, and the great powers are too paralysed by ideology and self-interest to act. In one of cinema’s most striking papal gestures, Kiril proposes that the Church divest itself of its accumulated wealth and offer it to feed the starving, putting the Gospel into action at the cost of institutional security. The film closes not with triumph but with the quiet, lonely weight of a man who has accepted a vocation he never sought, stepping out into a world that desperately needs what only selfless love can give.

Doctrinal Dissection – ‘The Preferential Option for the Poor’

The Church teaches that Christians are called to give particular attention, solidarity, and practical priority to those who are most vulnerable, marginalised, and suffering, not because the poor are morally superior but because their condition makes the most urgent claim on the conscience of a Church that follows a Christ who identified himself with the hungry, the stranger, and the outcast. The scriptural foundation is unambiguous: in Luke 4:18 Jesus announces his mission as good news to the poor and liberty to the oppressed, while in Matthew 25 he identifies himself directly with the hungry, the naked, and the imprisoned, making the treatment of the destitute inseparable from the treatment of God himself. The Catechism (§2448) affirms that “the love of the Church for the poor is a part of her constant tradition,” grounding the option not in political ideology but in the very nature of Christian charity, while the term was given systematic theological expression by Gustavo Gutiérrez in A Theology of Liberation (1971) and subsequently affirmed through Medellín (1968), John Paul II’s Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (1987), and Pope Francis’s Evangelii Gaudium (2013), which insists it is “primarily a theological category rather than a cultural, sociological, political, or philosophical one.”

However, the concept is not without its tensions, and the most penetrating critique came from Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI. In his 1984 Instruction on Certain Aspects of the Theology of Liberation, Ratzinger warned that certain strands of liberation theology had uncritically absorbed the analytical framework of Marxist class struggle, reducing the Gospel’s understanding of the poor to a sociological category and salvation itself to a programme of political emancipation. The poor of the Gospel, he insisted, are not simply an economic class whose liberation is achieved through structural revolution, but human persons whose dignity flows from their creation in the image of God and whose deepest poverty is spiritual as much as material. When liberation theology adopts Marxist analysis wholesale, Ratzinger argued, it risks transforming the Church from a community of grace and sacrament into an instrument of ideological struggle, and the priest from a minister of the Gospel into a political agitator. The authentic option for the poor must remain rooted in personal conversion, charity, and the supernatural order rather than in the mechanics of class conflict, or it ceases to be Christian and becomes merely revolutionary. The Shoes of the Fisherman (1968) translates the preferential option for the poor from theological principle into dramatic urgency, weaving it through a narrative that encompasses political imprisonment, institutional wealth, and global famine.

Anderson renders the film’s most theologically explosive moment with striking directness: newly elected Pope Kiril, confronted with the reality of millions facing starvation in China while the Church sits atop centuries of accumulated treasure, proposes that the Vatican divest itself of its wealth and offer it in service of the hungry. This act is the preferential option made flesh in its most radical and costly form, a lived enactment of Matthew 25 in which the Church is asked to see the face of Christ in the starving and to respond not with words but with sacrifice. The film is careful to frame this not as a political gesture but as a Gospel imperative, rooted in Kiril’s own experience of destitution in the labour camp where he learned that the Church’s credibility rests not on its grandeur but on its willingness to be poor alongside the poor. From a Catholic perspective this sequence is both inspiring and theologically precise, but Ratzinger’s caution is implicitly present: the film wisely grounds Kiril’s act in personal conversion and supernatural charity rather than in any ideology of structural revolution, ensuring that the option for the poor remains an act of grace rather than a political programme.

Anderson locates the moral authority of Kiril’s papacy not in his education, his connections, or his institutional credentials, but in the twenty years he spent as a prisoner, sharing the conditions of the most forgotten and powerless people on earth. This is liberation theology’s most searching insight rendered cinematically: that the Church speaks most truthfully and most powerfully about the poor when it has been formed by poverty itself rather than merely commenting upon it from a position of comfort. Kiril arrives in Rome as a man the world had discarded, bearing in his body what Saint Paul in Galatians 6:17 calls the marks of Jesus, the wounds of a life given over to suffering as witness, and it is precisely this that the film presents as his qualification for the highest office in the Church. Anderson suggests that the preferential option for the poor is not simply a policy the Church adopts but a condition the Church must be willing to inhabit, and that a papacy shaped by the labour camp will always see the world differently, and more clearly, than one shaped by the Curia.

Anderson constructs the film’s geopolitical crisis, in which China’s famine threatens to tip the world into war while the great powers remain paralysed by ideological rivalry, as a direct indictment of what happens when structural and political frameworks are prioritised over the immediate, irreducible claims of suffering human beings. The preferential option for the poor, properly understood, cuts through ideology precisely because it refuses to make the relief of suffering conditional on political alignment or systemic transformation: the hungry child does not wait for the revolution, and the Church’s response cannot be deferred until the structural conditions are right. This is where the film offers its most pointed implicit critique of the Marxist strand within liberation theology that Ratzinger identified: where Marxist analysis sees the poor primarily as a class whose liberation requires systemic overthrow, Kiril sees persons whose hunger requires an immediate and unconditional response. Anderson’s genius is to place this critique in the mouth not of a conservative defender of the institutional Church but of a man formed entirely by suffering and solidarity, making the case that the truest and most radical form of the option for the poor is one that transcends ideology entirely and rests on nothing more and nothing less than the recognition of the face of God in every human being who is hungry, cold, or forgotten.