Conclave stars Ralph Fiennes, Isabella Rosselini, and Stanley Tucci (Shutterstock)
My assignment (this was years ago) was to profile Archbishop Justin Rigali. A shy, diffident man who had zero desire to talk to the press. Frantic for insight, I did the usual sharklike circling, interviewing everyone I could find who knew him well. But the most helpful interview was with John Padberg, a Jesuit steeped in intellectual history and the study of culture. Padberg, who had spent a chunk of his life in Rome, nodded sagely, his eyes glinting in the lamplight, when I told him, over hot strong tea, what I was trying to do.
“Romanitas,” he murmured.
An entire teapot later, I was only beginning to understand what he meant. That rainy afternoon, he taught me a bit about the culture of the Vatican: its extreme formality and elaborate etiquette; its officiousness and ruthless power plays; its sense of timeless importance and, despite the global scope, recognizably Italian underpinnings. Above all, he made me understand the Vatican’s secretive and shadowy aspect, easily seen as sinister but felt by insiders as plain necessity.
Rigali spent the first thirty years of his priesthood in that world. Then he arrived in St. Louis. Nine years later, he was moved to Philadelphia and made a cardinal. In 2005, he was part of the conclave that elected Pope Benedict XVI.
Watching Conclave, I muttered romanitas to myself at regular intervals. Even the cinematography captures that culture, both its internal tensions and its tension with the outside world. We know we are about to see more than one hundred cardinals, all clad uniformly in the red garb of their elevated position, flock to Rome to elect a new pope. Yet what we see first is a single man—Cardinal Thomas Lawrence, dean of the college of cardinals—on an anxious, solitary walk to the deathbed of the pope he loved. Those in the pope’s inner circle stand around the bed, faces nearly lost in the shadows, murmuring prayers in a soft, sonorous Latin meant to fix everything.
“The throne of the Holy See is vacant,” one man intones, and with that, Lawrence—played flawlessly by Ralph Fiennes—must take charge of the conclave to elect the next pope. The cardinals fly in, and heavy wooden doors at least eighteen feet high swing shut. There will be secret meetings in stairwells and empty rooms, while outside in bright sunshine, crowds wait to see billows of dark smoke change to white, the ancient sign that a new pope has been chosen.
References to Vatican II thread through the film, with wistful nods to Pope John XXIII and an opened window at the end, like the one he used symbolically to let fresh air into the church. But it is also clear that the tensions in this tight Roman enclave mirror political tensions around the world. Conservative cardinals are eager to undo Vatican II reforms, distrustful of their brethren from African nations, Islamophobic, rigid, and indifferent to the poor they are meant to serve. When nuns arrive by the dozen, I lean close to my best friend since (Catholic all-girls) high school and whisper, “Bet they’re here to cook and clean.” In the next frame, they are shown setting elegant tables for the cardinals’ repast.
In a quiet aside, Lawrence confides to a friend that just weeks earlier, he asked to leave the Vatican, and the pope refused his resignation. The friend (Stanley Tucci’s Cardinal Bellini) nods: “He told me about your crisis of faith. You should know he had his own.” Lawrence is stunned: the pope had lost his faith in God? “What he had lost faith in,” Bellini corrects him, “was the Church.”
One by one, as in an Agatha Christie, misdeeds surface, disqualifying cardinals eager to be the next pope. We watch the scheming, the canvasing, the battle of vices, as a cardinal who was sacked by the pope on the very eve of his death blazes a denial at the revelation and tries to discredit his accuser by publicizing his heavy drinking. Priesthood is a sterile laboratory for human nature, a controlled experiment that shows us at our noble best but also our most craven and corrupt. And these men all know each other too well.
Some entered to secure their lives with holy certitude—and pretending life is that clean, and they are that pure, has made them harsh judges. “There is one sin which I have come to fear above all others,” Lawrence says in a homily: “Certainty. Certainty is the enemy of unity.” He reminds them that if there were only certainty, with no doubt, “there would be no mystery, and therefore no need for faith.”
Mystery was what I loved about Catholicism. Not the secrecy of romanitas, but the deep mystery of sacrament and symbol. Biblical literalism and fundamentalism felt flat and static, like a theory of Earth that fails to curve and rotate. But Conclave also exposes the core of what I came to see as hypocrisy: the tendency, as soon as the going gets scary or painful, to stop exploring. Fraught by one complex and damaging revelation after another, Lawrence orders his assistant to stop investigating: “Let God’s will be done.” Which sounds noble, but why was it not God’s will that ruled a day earlier?
Taut and well acted, the film is beautiful, the white and red vestments glowing against gray stone; the melted red wax of the papal seal (this detail will matter later) as bright as fresh blood. Flesh, vulnerability, fear, weakness—none of that can be denied, not even in the inner sanctum. Secrets must out. In the end, an infusion of faith as it is meant to be lived comes from a young cardinal, one who was secretly named for his own protection because he was serving in a war zone in Afghanistan. The church is not tied to the past, he reminds the others. The church “is what we do next.”
Resisting the redemptive streak that runs through Conclave, I realize how cynical I have become. Though the film is searingly honest, it feels a little too pat as it draws to an end. But then everything turns upside down. Which could feel manipulative, were it handled with less grace.
Spoiling this ending would be that rare, near impossible thing: an unforgivable sin.
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.
