While visiting the Vatican over the weekend, acclaimed director Martin Scorsese announced that he plans to make a new film about Jesus, according to reports.
Scorsese briefly met with Pope Francis prior to the declaration of his future cinematic vision.
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The pope addressed a room full of individuals in the arts, including Scorsese, and stated, “Today the church needs your genius because it needs to protest, to call out and to shout.”
The director later felt moved and said, “I have responded to the Pope’s appeal to artists in the only way I know how: by imagining and writing a screenplay for a film about Jesus,” Variety reported.
“And I’m about to start making it.”
Scorsese was a speaker at “The Global Aesthetics of the Catholic Imagination” conference on Saturday where he made the declaration.
The event was organized by the journal La Civilta Cattolica and Georgetown University.
It aims to bring together a wide variety of individuals “who self-identify as Catholic or pay homage to Catholicism as a formative dimension of their artistry.”
Some of the questions the conference aimed to address were, “How do artists from various cultures appropriate Catholicism as a resource for their creative work?
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“What are the ways that this faith tradition interrogates contemporary life, explores the human condition, and responds to the hunger for some transcendental significance?”
And finally, “In what ways do artists employ transgressive or unorthodox discourses that question the intellectual, social, even political heritage in which this faith is lived?”
The 80-year-old director has previously turned to religion as inspiration for his craft.
While promoting his 2016 film “Silence,” Scorsese spoke with FULLER studio to discuss the film and his faith.
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He posed the question, “In any event, the whole idea is … how to live Christianity in daily life. How does one do it?”
“We don’t make religion something that is foreign, that’s separate from life.
“That’s the key.”
Scorsese added, “Where do I go to find the meaning of existence and the meaning of life? For me, that’s Christianity.”
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.