Martin Scorsese meets pope as film on Jesuits screens in Rome

Pope Francis met Martin Scorsese after a special screening in Rome of the Oscar-winning director’s new film Silence, about Jesuit missionaries in 17th century Japan.

For Scorsese, who spent a year in a “minor seminary”, a high school for boys considering priesthood, the meeting came almost 30 years after his film The Last Temptation of Christ outraged many conservative Christians.

The encounter held significance too for the 79-year-old pope, a member of the Jesuit order who as a young priest in Argentina had wanted to go to Japan as a missionary, but could not for health reasons.

At the meeting in the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace, the pope told Scorsese that he too had read the 1966 novel on which the film was based, Silence, by the late Japanese writer Shusaku Endo, who was a convert to Catholicism.

The Italian-American director attended a screening of Silence on Tuesday night for more than 300 Jesuit priests. A second screening was planned for a smaller audience in the Vatican afternoon, though it was not clear if the pope would attend.

The film, due to premiere in United States in December, is about two Portuguese Jesuit missionaries who travel to Japan in the 17th century to search for their missing mentor, who is rumoured to have renounced the faith under torture.