Leonardo DiCaprio had a private audience with Pope Francis to discuss a cause as both are passionate about the environment. The Revenant actor and the head of Roman Catholic Church met in Vatican on Thursday morning, when they also exchanged sacred gifts.
DiCaprio spoke in Italian for the private visit, greeting the pope in the foreign language. “Your Holiness, thank you for granting me this private audience with you,” DiCaprio said in Italian.
The Oscar nominee gifted pontiff a book of works from the 15th-century Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, and showed him a reproduction of the Bosch painting that hung over the actor’s crib as a child, “The Garden of Earthly Delights.” The painting is a triptych that depicts God presenting Eve to Adam on the left, a landscape of the Earth in the middle and an illustration of hell on the right.
“As a child I didn’t quite understand what it all meant, but through my child’s eyes it represented a planet, the utopia we had been given, the overpopulation, excesses, and the third panel we see a blackened sky that represents so much to me of what’s going in in the environment,” DiCaprio told the pope.
In addition to the book and painting, DiCaprio presented a personal check to use for a charity close to the pope’s heart.
For his part, Pope Francis gave DiCaprio a leather-bound copy of his papal letter to the church’s bishops, “Laudato Si,” and his apostolic exhortation, “The Joy of the Gospel.”
