I imagine the Pope in a beyond, faced with a number of subtle
enlightening challenges. Small, subtle stories full of creeping,
intimate revelation. Something like, he finds himself on a path in the
Italian countryside. A little girl runs up. Her cat has gone into a
tree. He goes into the tree to get the cat, but the cat jumps on the
tail of a passing kite and the Pope has no choice but to follow. They
fly up and up, above the highest clouds, and the kite lets them both
off in a field of newly harvested alfalfa. The cat goes running up a
tree, and a little girl appears...

This happens repeatedly, until the Pope figures out something unusual
about the cat, and then he's enlightened -- it represents the cycle of
death & rebirth, and the knowledge is the ticket off this merry-go-round.
Bodhisattva that he is, the Pope smiles and declines the ticket...
SMASH CUT TO: the next challenge, whatever it is.

What'll be his reaction when he finds the dogma of Catholicism is only
a thin, inaccurate veneer over the truth of things? That it's a
brilliant story, but only a story, crafted by humans & synods &
catechisms and etc.?

How it goes, though -- he'll first see the whole schmear, God, Jesus,
Mary, throne of Heaven, angels, la la la, etc. They don't confront
souls with the truth immediately, back of beyond. They ease you into
it. You know. You've gone through it a million times. They wake you up
slowly, they don't throw a bucket of cold ectoplasm on you. They, after
all, love you. They wouldn't hurt you.