On Conclave (the film)

The Church is What’s Next

It is hard to know where to start with this reflection on Conclave, the 2024 film directed by Edward Berger. There is so much in it. I have been surprised to see this film so well appreciated by secular audiences. I asked one religiously unaffiliated cinephile writer beloved why he liked the movie. I’ll call him T. * He described the Conclave “as a great drama that depicts a process that is intentionally very reclusive…it’s like getting behind a curtain into a world you know nothing about.” As a Catholic who studies Roman Catholicism and its particulars, I found the fascination of those who know little about the workings of Roman Catholicism fascinating, and the presumption that there would be so much interest, telling.

Conclaves are painstakingly sealed off to ensure privacy, integrity, and insulation from worldly events and influences. In Conclave, we see these efforts fail. Confidences are violated, interruptions within and from beyond the hostel where the cardinals eat and sleep during their deliberation interfere. A political event disrupts the voting in the apostolic palace, breaking the silence and unsealing the space, letting light of the world enter in, by force.

This light ‘breaking and entering’ is a recurring motif in the film. These men dwell in shadow. They carry their project through the centuries like a carapace. One of several takeaway messages of this cinematic tour de force is that seals are sometimes futile and have the propensity to increase and deepen corruption.

The process of electing pomntiffs has never been pure. The papacy has been bought and sold numerous times throughout history. It’s not secret that cardinals who long to sit in “Peter’s Chair” campaign behind the scenes, before after and during conclaves. (Some church-watchers believe that New York’s cardinal’s premature campaigning to be the first pope from the United States resulted in his de facto erasure from the papabile list. That same prelate, Timothy Dolan, all but called the Pope Francis’s time of death a week ago. Today he pontiff is rallying! Cardinals plan and God laughs.

In some ways Conclave is not about religion at all. It’s about empire, obedience, cult mentality, denial, and fiscal and political corruption; the contemporary longing for a strong(man) leader, soul-eating venality, greed, male supremacy, misogyny, patriarchy, patrimony, and the tendency of tyrannical men to extinguish the light of the world in exchange for power. Yet nestled within all that pettiness and depravity, soft creatures yearnng to know and be Christ endure. They carry their heavy spiritual home through the secular world and through history, and struggle to endure and manifest Christ. It seems to me that Cardinal Lawrence, the Dean of Cardinals, played by Ralph Fiennes, is one of those.

Reasons for folks with no interest in religion or Catholicism to love Conclave do abound. The film is beautiful looking, especially in light of the director’s refusals to over-rely upon the low hanging fruit of church art and ornamentation in the film. Berger pushes away from putti, stained glass, brocade, gold and incense and mirrors to clear space for the examination of belief itself. The hostel that houses the cardinals between sessions looks like a clean but unremarkable college dorm. The juxtapositions Berger incorporates throughout the picture are poetic: I’m thinking of the hands of nuns working at industrial steam tables, shaping pasta into tortellini as the clownish cardinals “vested” in red velvet and pectoral bling drink, smoke and contrive to shiv each other in Jesus’s name.

The artfulness of the genius acting does so much of the work of the film. The face alone of Fiennes’ as Cardinal Lawrence delivers an object lesson on “dark night of the soul.”

Berger’s fidelity. to the work of fleshing out the drama of doubt and belief was, for me, the great strength if Conclave. In truth the vatican serves more as a setting than the actual subject of Conclave, because loss of faith is bigger than any corporation, sovereign nation or global institution — and the recovery of lost faith may be greater still. God may exist outside of human time but Roman Catholicism is only two thousand-years-old, a tiny fraction of the age of the human animal.

“The Church” — by which I mean to say “the Roman Catholic Church” — is more wealthy than we can imagine. Few know how much the institution is worth and those who know the most lie about it. Popes and their Communications experts have been astonishingly successful since the early days of John Paul II, at peddling an idealized vision of popes’ virtues. Catholics are taught to esteem the pope, any pope. Chauvinistic obedience to any pope, no matter how corrupt, has been key in ensuring the endurance of the institutional Roman Catholic Church. Even beyond the Roman Catholic Church, popes are widely loved and relied upon as moral experts. Pope Francis, the current pontiff, is 88 and ailing at present. Nearly every report on his status includes some variation on “I’m not Catholic but” followed by a word of concern about the pontiff, prayers for the pontiff, love for the pontiff. The Vatican has the best Public Relations team money can buy, and it works.

In some ways Conclave is not about religion at all. It’s about empire, obedience, cult mentality, denial, fiscal and political corruption, the contemporary longing for a strong(man) leader, soul-eating venality, greed, male supremacy, misogyny, patriarchy, patrimony, and the tendency of tyrannical men to sacrifice the good in exchange for power. Once need not be religious to do all that.

Despite all that, it must be said, nestled within all the stony indifference, is the soft part of “the Church,” the Christ part, perhaps, that carries the heavy weight of the institution’s malfeasance through the daily world and history. Modest and slow, it endures. Conclave takes interest in that part. For those with deep interest in Catholic thought, Conclave is satisfying. Whether by design or simply by dint of its being set in the vatican, the film offers a vision of a church that could in theory — survive with its soul intact were it to clear space for the justice, imagination and more conscientious examination of the nature of belief itself.

Berger is interested in that scrutiny. The motif of light breaking into shadowy silence recurs steadily throughout the film like a refrain in a poem, and that illumination illuminates what the men at the head of the operation do not want the world to see: their sins and vices, their casuistry, chauvinism, situational ethics, promulgated bigotries and corruption.

“No sane man would want the papacy. The men who do want it are dangerous.”

Edward Berger’s vision is based on the words and stories told by Robert Harris in his 2016 novel (Conclave) and Peter Straughan’s screenplay. The film debuted in the United States about two months before Election Day, 2024. That the religious drama of the movie maps neatly onto our nation’s ongoing secular political drama might also explain Conclave ‘s wide appeal.

“Ends justify the means” / “no scruples” Catholics had already put their extreme, obscene wealth to work in stacking the Supreme Court of the United States with integralist Catholics determined to do what the 35^th president of the United States, John F. Kennedy, vowed not to do when he said the following:

The President is not elected to be protector of the faith - or guardian of the public morals. His attendance at church on Sunday should be his business alone, not a showcase for the nation.” (John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum)

The structure and setting of a conclave lend a solid model for an exploration of situational ethics, politicking, and Machiavellian duplicity in action. “No sane man would want the papacy. The men who do want it are dangerous.” An insane man with no substantive sense of the magnitude of the responsibility the American presidency has wanted nothing more for the past four decades that to rule as a dictator, and now does. Americans, Catholic and not, have been targets of Catholic encroachment into. their government American audiences have been living a version of this in their civic lives for the past decade. Catholicism and the so-called “pro-life” movement underpinned the purchase of the Supreme Court by right-wing, integralist Catholics. I believe this explains much the enthusiasm for Conclave on the part of many United States moviegoers who may have no special interest in religion or Catholicism. The rise of Trump has generated fervor for understanding patriarchy, male supremacy, permissible bigotry, misogyny, greed, cultish blind obedience. Where better to look for this than (Catholic) Rome?

We (American) all watched her clown bishop attempt to discipline House Speaker Nancy Pelosi publicly for believing, as many Catholics do, in the right to obtain a legal, safe, medical abortion. (A Catholic priest with whom I used to teach used to refer to the public shaming of women this as “spanking.” ) Conclave audiences watched New York’s archbishop Timothy Dolan stroke and pander to Trump for years. Half of United States Roman Catholics voted for Trump every time he ran. Less than two months before Election Day in the United States, Pope Francis made the following statement:

“Both are against life, be it the one who kicks out migrants, or be it the one who kills babies. the Pope said.”

The pontiff often shoots from the hip when speaking informally, and he often walks back his comments later, but there can be no doubt that this particular misnomer (“bambini” for “feti”) cost Vice President Kamala Harris Catholic votes. The Conclave audience viewing the film are living the blurring of the church/state divide and erosion of the Establishment Clause. In both religious and secular contexts, primacy of conscience and matters of discernment have been in the air — for all Americans. We watched while living the rise of a strongman who seeks the kind of absolute power many (variously) believe popes wield.

We saw “ends justify the means” and “no scruples” justifications normalized. We saw a petty, dishonest, misogynist, avaricious grifter become president. We saw stupid become smart, and evil become good. “I know you are but what I am I”, accusation in a mirror got somewhat, somehow legitimized. Conclave looks at a world in which evil passes for good with help from mechanisms that justify injustice, cover-up of rape, larceny, and promulgated bigotry by the need to safeguard Our Mother, the corporate institution who is “the Church.”

I wanted to write about Conclave the day after seeing it in September of this year, but family commitments have kept me from completing many of my ongoing projects. I made notes, waited, and strained all the while to avoid reading commentaries on Conclave. I did read one, however, just after seeing the film and it has served as something of a guide for me, in thinking and writing about the film.

I read and wrote about an hysterical commentary penned by a popular bishop, Robert Barron, that seemed designed to discourage Catholics from seeing the Conclave. about the film. (Barron, is a 700 Club-styled Opus Dei grifter bishop.) Robert Barron included a critical spoiler in his denunciation of the film, hoping to ruin the experience, I believe, for any Catholic who would wish to see it. I was reminded as I read this thing, of the time my brother Scott licked a cookie on my plate, so I couldn’t eat it and he could. Scott was about six years old at the time. I was seven. Robert Barron is 65.

I was reminded, also, that any movie about a conclave could be expected vex a guy like Barron. He’s not a cardinal. He’s just a ambitious Opus Dei bishop with his nose pressed up against the conclave window. Reading that review of Conclave felt so meta. It pleased me to witness his bile-fueled “showing” of his faux intellectual “ass.” I vowed then not to read or be influenced by another word on the topic of Conclave until after I had posted something. I also committed myself to trying hard to avoid spoilers.

My guess is. that most reasonably intelligent Roman Catholic clerics have no objections to Conclave. but it is good to notice Catholics who do object to this film. These are the ones who know that casuistry and duplicity among the clerics are norms. These are the ones who tell you can’t understand Aquinas or what the “conscience” really means. These are the ones who know that breaking the rules is as commonplace as imposing them. They just don’;t want you to know. Rules are for the paying customers — the sheeple, not the bagmen. Priests are exempt. Prelates are more exempt still. But they are all thirst for those sheeple per capita dollars, and they know that, in this, news of their venality breaking can be a liability. So they do a dance, they cut corners: Vatican Optics.

The second most virtuous character in Conclave breaks the seal on a room he’s not supposed to enter. The somewhat progressive-minded “papabile” cardinal, played by Stanley Tucci, whose stunning performance almost seems modeled on a popular fame-chasing Jesuit, is the film’s most vocal anti-misogynist, but he stops short of hoping to ordain one. He winds up a wee bit ensnared in “ends justifies the means” duplicity.

Another reason some Catholics dislike Conclave is that it shines bright harsh light on the promulgated bigotry of the Roman Catholic Church — most specifically, the misogyny.

from Isabella Rossellini ‘s Instagram

“Although we sisters are supposed to be invisible, God has nonetheless given us eyes and ears.”

It is clear from the first moment a nun appears on screen that Conclave is a movie about misogyny and the male supremacist character of the Roman Catholic Church. If (my) memory serves, there is not a single woman on camera in the film who is not wearing a habit. Every woman who appears on screen is a nun, and not just any nun, but the old-fashioned kind, the kind Vatican II began to render extinct. There are no the “nuns on the bus” in this movie. These sisters are maids who serve at the pleasure of men. And only women religious in habits, we should infer, can be trusted to enter this sancto sanctorum. Their job is to labor invisibly, but one wants to see them coming.

The casting of Isabella Rossellini was a wild, genius move.

For those who know the 1945 film The Bells of St. Mary’s and remember Rossellini’s mother, Ingrid Bergman in the role of Sister Mary Benedict, Rossellini as Sister Agnes packs quite a punch! (I’m very interested in the 1945 film and have written quite a lot about The Bells of St. Mary’s for the book I am working on.)

For movie viewers too young to remember her mother in a habit, Rossellini’s performance, her deep wise-woman beauty and projection of searing but muzzled intelligence suffice to thrill. Films like The Bells of St Mary’s have long operated as public relations for the Roman Catholic Church in the United States. They’ve made the Catholic Church look incandescently innocent, delightfully human and like a club even non-Christians might admire. Some such worthy aspects of Catholic life existed, and remain true of Catholic life and praxis, but these idealized characterizations have also given cover to predator clerics, sadistic teachers, fiscally corrupt prelates and faith grifters. Bells of St. Mary-style optics, which often depict Catholics lay and religious as charity superheroes, feed the beast of Catholic exceptionalism, the kind that makes attempts at imposing Catholic law and beliefs on non-Catholics seem benign. In the film The Bells of St. Mary, charming Father O’Malley and the good sisters, led by the school principal, Sister Mary Benedict, cadge a building for the Catholic school kids from a wealthy misanthrope.

A side-by-side look at 1945’s Sister Mary Benedict (Bells of St. Mary) and 2024’s Sister Agnes (Conclave) is as damning as it is fascinating: a visual encapsulation of how far the Roman Catholic Church has failed to come in 80 years!

The depiction of women laboring in silence early on in Conclave offers an initial clue about the director’s disposition on the ‘woman problem.’ The second clue is the reaction to the prayer the late-arriving Cardinal Benitez says when tapped to say grace before the first meal the cardinals share. Benitez recites the mercifully short, familiar “Bless us, O Lord and these thy gifts…” prayer most Catholics know, but he extends this petition to include remembering those who are hungry and the sisters who prepared the meal. A confused What? Pray for THEM?! energy appears to come over the men.

Later, in the same space, Sister Agnes is forced to stand alone and speak up about a matter of consequence and conscience:

“Although we sisters are supposed to be invisible,” Sister Agnes says, “God has nevertheless given us eyes and ears.”

Princes and handmaids. The misogyny is so baked in, even the “good guys” can’t shake it. Jesus of Nazareth is more a “bug” than feature. Children of God only minus the God.

(If you have not seen the film yet, look for the scene in the rain that conjures handmaids. They’re not women. They’re not even adults.

What Rough Beast

My second favorite moment, because I love theology, is an address — the part spoken “from the heart,” presented by Lawrence, just before the start of the first day of the conclave. He calls “certainty” and enemy of tolerance.

“If there was only certainty and no doubt, there would be no mystery, and therefore no need for faith.”

And because I am a poet, this moment, in which the boorish vaping trad Italian Cardinal Tedesco recites line from The Second Coming by the Irish poet W.B.Yeats, might be my favorite:

“Things fall apart,” Cardinal Tedesco says, the [center] cannot hold;”

Big gratitude to T., xo, my writer friend and co-inspirator, who’s inspired me these past months to comment on this.

MMS

March 2, 2025

Revised, March 4, 2025