I have never subscribed to most film critics' notion that Godfather 3 turned out to be a disastrous way of capping Francis Ford Coppola's Oscar Awards-hogging series on the rise and fall of the Corleone Italian mafia clan.

Redemption — no matter how superficial the manner it was sought by the original godfather, Don Vito Corleone played by Marlon Brando, and successor-son Michael — had been well-sewn into the fabric of the Godfather trilogy.

From where I've sat rewatching Godfathers 1, 2, and 3 many times over, the series-ender in the 1990s more than lived up to the original novel's theme of money and power being used with little success to wipe the blood off the crime family's history.

What's not to like about Al Pacino's Michael Corleone trying in vain to gain societal acceptance and, laughably absurd, a veneer of integrity, through the buy-in rescue of a debt-ridden Vatican Bank as its new majority shareholder?

Throw in the shadowy figures behind the walls of the Vatican in Rome conspiring to assassinate a pope, whose "sin" was to preside over a hopelessly corrupt church willing to serve as a laundromat to the Corleone family's dirty money, and you have a celluloid winner.

Life can be stranger or – as we try to get out of a pandemic – as strange as fiction, at least, in this day and age, of the two popes and the Vatican once again hugging the news for all the wrong reasons.

Our own Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, touted just years back as being of pope material as the toast of the Vatican, had been, to the chagrin of Filipinos, unceremoniously dismissed by Pope Francis himself as head of the church's charity organization Caritas.

Church politics at play?

Of small consolation was that Tagle, who had been heading Caritas for over half a decade now, was allowed by the sickly Pope to preside over announcing the heads of the Caritas transition team. The brouhaha, Vatican apologists were quick to assert, does not reek of plunder, sex, and anything Bacchanalian.

Just some ruffled feathers, bruised egos, and grassroots morale that have to be smoothened out and assuaged, the Vatican defenders claimed. Okay, if they say so, as we're not going to start conjuring something like Dan Brown's Angels and Demons here.