The Conclave that Might have Been

A missed opportunity.

There’s a good story buried somewhere in Conclave, a movie which (fair warning) I am about to spoil heedlessly. People I like and respect have called it an anti-Catholic movie, but—though I see why they say so—I don’t think that’s quite right. What the movie does, though, is take for granted that the Catholic Church needs to move left.

Since this is a point of view that some Catholics do hold, I wouldn’t say exactly that Conclave is against Catholicism in all its forms. It’s just for a very specific kind of Catholicism, the kind most palatable to prim liberal outsiders—the kind, it must be said, that the current pontiff has a habit of gesturing toward in unguarded moments.

Conclave never even pauses to raise the question whether the Church should become more universalist, more indulgent toward modern life, more sexually egalitarian. It just takes those aims for granted and asks, in the tense negotiations surrounding the election of a new pope, how to get there.

To be fair, almost every character is morally compromised in some way—including the liberals. That’s one of the movie’s strengths. But the scandals are supposed to trouble us most because they divide and undermine the opponents of the indisputably villainous Cardinal Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto) who, in the words of his rival Cardinal Bellini (Stanley Tucci), “will undo sixty years of progress.”

For all the complexity and ambiguity that Peter Straughan’s screenplay introduces elsewhere, it never seriously asks us to doubt who’s on the right side of history. I mean come on, one of them is Stanley Tucci! I hear the original novel is more subtle, and maybe that’s true. The film, for its part, is visually lush, well-paced, masterfully acted, and full of intrigue—but only if you accept its premises wholesale.

Unfortunately, its premises are also absurd. In The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis imagines that demons always try to “direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is least in danger.” I couldn’t help thinking of this passage as Conclave warned me gravely against the sin of “certainty” and the danger of intolerance in the Church.

Cardinal Tedesco shows his true colors after a suicide bomber blows up a crowd near the Vatican. Mr. meanie conserva-pants then flies into a spittle-flecked rant about the actual doom threatening European Christendom, which is to be smothered in pious niceties while violent extremists wage holy war at the gates in the name of other gods.

This monologue is purposefully written to be hamfisted, spiteful, and unappealing. It’s also directionally one hundred percent correct. Warning against intolerance makes perfect sense in Conclave’s imaginary world, where Catholicism is veering perilously toward medieval witch-hunting. In the real world—where actual Catholicism is run by a moony revolutionary—it hardly seems, at least this Prot, that the danger is too much crusader spirit among the guys in charge.

But this is exactly where the story could have gotten good. The dark horse candidate is Cardinal Benitez (Carlos Diehz), who has been secretly appointed to a heroic ministry in the dangerous Afghan capital of Kabul. Benitez comes from behind and wins the papacy once it’s clear that even our protagonist, the self-effacing compromiser Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) isn’t the man for the job. Only Benitez has the quiet moral courage and unassuming humility that fits him for the Church’s highest office.

And this idea—that unseen beneath the worldly drama of institutional power politics, the one worthy man has been ministering in secret to the least of these—that’s a good story. The thought that the right pope might be laboring undercover, risking persecution and death unacknowledged, his true quality known only to God until His appointed time—that’ll preach. If it weren’t for the irresistible urge to grandstand and pander, I suspect that’s the story Conclave could have told.

Unfortunately the whole thing is ruined as soon as it gets going by the preposterous last-minute reveal that Benitez has a uterus. Reader, I guffawed. Not at the idea that the pope might be intersex, but at the notion that this might pose some great conundrum for the Catholic Church.

It’s the gender maximalists who have proposed that intersex people should be lumped in with trans people for the purposes of bad-faith public argument. Only if you grant the equation of the two categories—which Catholics don’t—would Benitez be anything other than intrinsically male and fully eligible for ordination.

To find this twist shocking you have to imagine a total fantasy world, in which conservative Catholics are automatically intolerant of difference per se and it’s them, not the alphabet people, who confuse trans and intersex. But that’s the fantasy world in which, I’m afraid, Conclave takes place.

Rejoice evermore,
Spencer