Good fiction can make history come alive; conceivably, sometimes, it may cause history to happen. If the latter is indeed conceivable, then Pope Francis I may have been invented by the Australian novelist Morris West in The Shoes of the Fisherman (1963). The novel was made into an American movie in 1968. (Francis was then thirty-two years old. Did young Jesuit seminarians in Argentina ever go to the movies in those days?) The protagonist of West’s book and its film version was Archbishop Kiril Lakota of Lvov in the Soviet Union (now Lviv, in Ukraine). He is released after twenty …read more
Source: The American Interest
