Following the death of Pope Francis on April 21, last year’s Conclave became a timely film. Edward Berger’s movie offers a full view into the historically secretive process of selecting the Roman pontiff. Featuring a star-studded cast, the film provides more insight into the heads of the Church than many of the faithful may find comfortable. With themes of a divided church, ambition within a spiritual institution, and the politics of gender, Conclave gave viewers a sense of what to expect as the process that selected Cardinal Robert Prevost as the new pope got underway.
From a cinematic perspective alone, Conclave stuns: music, wardrobe, setting, acting all beautifully done. The screenwriters and production team clearly did their homework. Ralph Fiennes, who starred as Cardinal Thomas Lawrence, the dean of the College of Cardinals and head of the conclave, spoke during interviews that there was a spiritual adviser on set to try and make the movie as accurate as possible.
Yet Conclave will not be remembered so much for its ornament as for its substance. Others have commented elsewhere that Conclave is shallow, left-wing, anti-Catholic propaganda, but in fact the movie deals with many important themes.
Its primary preoccupation is the intrigue and politicking that goes into picking the next pope. There are two primary elements at play: faction and ambition. Conclave depicts a church badly divided between “progressives,” as exemplified by Cardinal Aldo Bellini (Stanley Tucci) and Cardinal Lawrence, and a “conservative” group consisting of African cardinals led by Cardinal Joshua Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati), allied with the traditionalist Italian Cardinal Goffredo Tedesco (Sergio Castellito). Cardinal Bellini tells Cardinal Lawrence that the conclave “is a war, and you have to commit to a side.”
The terminology used in modern politics—“conservative,” “traditionalist,” “liberal,” “progressive”—does not easily map onto matters of theological dogma: the Real Presence of the Eucharist, biblical inerrancy, marriage as a union of man and woman, the impossibility of female ordination, the impermissibility of abortion, etc. Tedesco and Bellini would agree on all these issues, albeit with different emphases and rhetorical and pastoral presentations. Bellini and Tedesco, representing opposite “poles” of the Church’s political self-understanding, are not different political parties vying for the presidency by appealing to constituencies on the basis of rival platforms. Even so the political divisions in the Church, though real, are overblown in Conclave.
What makes matters worse is the problem of ambition, which Bellini claims every cardinal has. Indeed, in the film personal ambition leads to corruption in the case of Cardinal Joseph Tremblay (John Lithgow), who commits simony to win votes and engages in character assassination against a fellow cardinal to take him out of contention. Despite detractors of the film pointing to this portrayal as casting the Church in a bad light, any institution with immense power such as the See of St. Peter can be expected to stoke the flames of ambition in the sinful human heart. Cardinal Bellini’s shrewdness is refreshing and realistic, if melodramatic.
More important, however, is the issue of ambition for the Church. The self-consciously progressive and traditionalist factions have ambitions for the entire Church beyond the aggrandizement of their own station in the Curia. Cardinal Tremblay is a self-seeker, but Bellini and Tedesco are “true believers” in their respective causes. If there really is significant division in the Church (does anyone doubt that there is?), then this type of ambition—on both sides—is a clear danger: the See of Peter does not make the Church the plaything of the pope, and it should not be treated as if it does.
Enter Cardinal Vincent Benitez (Carlos Diehz), the in pectore (secretly appointed) cardinal-archbishop of Kabul. Known to none of the other cardinals and oblivious to the politicking of the Curia, Benitez represents spiritual purity amidst a conclave of corruption and worldliness. After a terrorist explosion disrupts the elections (Robert Harris’s book that inspired the screenplay was written in 2016 at the height of ISIS terrorism and a number of significant “lone wolf” attacks), a debate breaks out between Tedesco, who uses the tragedy to rail against the “relativism” of “our liberal brothers” and call for fighting a “true religious war” against Islam, and Cardinal Benitez, who offers a gentle rebuke against “giving into hate” and calls the behavior of the conclave “small” and “petty.” Benitez is then elected pope on the next ballot, taking the papal name “Innocent.”
Excitement over the new pope then turns into yet another intrigue as Cardinal Lawrence is informed by Monsignor O’Malley (Brían O’Byrne) that Benitez was scheduled for a procedure at a Geneva gender clinic. When confronted by Lawrence, Benitez reveals he is intersex. Or is he?
He does not read off a clinical chart or comprehensive medical history, but we learn that Benitez grew up as a normal boy and was discovered to have a uterus and ovaries after undergoing an appendectomy. “Some people would say that my chromosomes would define me as being a woman, and yet I am also as you see me,” he says. “I am how God made me.”
The revelation of Benitez’s unclear gender identity is one reason many conservatives abjure this movie. Bishop Robert Barron called Benitez a “virtual-signaling cardinal . . . who is a biological female.” Yet, with due respect to Bishop Baron, this plot twist, however strange, is not the slam dunk on the Church that the critics think it is.
If Conclave was supposed to mock Catholics on the politics of gender, its creators should have sneaked in a transgender pope. But that is not what happens here. Instead, we have a person who from the plot evidence given, has a penis and testes, a uterus and ovaries, perhaps XX chromosomes (did Benitez have genetic testing to confirm the karyotype?), and by all life experience and self-understanding has lived as a male. What is he? Or better yet, who is he? To say he is an “intersex” pope or “genetically female” is mistaken.
People are either male or female, which includes people whose “maleness” or “femaleness” looks slightly different in extremely rare cases (less than .02%). People who have disorders of sexual development certainly do exist, but to reduce them to “male genetics” and “female genetics” or to their sexual characteristics, rather than examining the whole person, commits the fallacy of sex ideology.
By the criteria of sex ideology, XY chromosomes always equal “male”—or others might say “all women have uteruses,” which is mostly but not always true; for instance, people with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome lack the capacity in utero for processing testosterone, have undescended testes and usually no ovaries or womb, but otherwise look like and go through life like women. It is a category error to call them “intersex,” “transgender,” or “hermaphrodites,” despite the claims of the LGBT and politicized medical establishments. Instead, XY chromosomes with the phenotypic expression of “females” are women, not “social females and chromosomal males.” The same fact is true, mutatis mutandis, of Benitez: he is a man.
This is all to say that the conclusion “I am how God made me” is the truest answer and completely unproblematic with respect to Church teaching. Biological sex is real and determines one’s identity, but we are more than the sum of our parts; Conclave built better than its makers knew.
Indeed, far from being shallow propaganda against the Church, Conclave is a probing, if politicized, look into the heart of the Church, where we find an institution led on the human level by flawed men, susceptible to the same temptations as the rest of us. This has always been so. The old joke about the Church is relevant: “How do you know Catholicism is true? Because the only way an institution as corrupt as the Church can continue to exist is if it is actually guided by the Holy Spirit.”
Politico reported that the Francis-appointed newcomers to the College of Cardinals watched Conclave to understand the process. Leo XIV is now pope, but this film remains something we can all watch to remind us of the movement of the Holy Spirit through the process and the Church.
