Between The World's Certainties

The revelations of Conclave

This essay contains major spoilers for the film Conclave

After months of glowing reviews and recommendations from friends, my wife and I finally watched the film Conclave this past weekend. Widely considered one of the finest films of last year, it stars luminaries such as Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, and Isabella Rosellini, and was nominated for Best Picture, Best Leading Actor, and Best Supporting Actress (among other nominations) at the most recent Academy Awards.

If you are unfamiliar with the film, it follows the events of the secretive conclave that the cardinals of the Roman Catholic church participate in to select a new pope. The film begins with the death of the current pope, and follows Cardinal Thomas Lawrence (Fiennes), the Dean of the College of Cardinals, as he oversees the gathering and proceedings of the conclave.

Certainty and Ambition

A major theme that the film explores is the intoxicating combination of certainty and ambition. We learn early on in the film that Cardinal Lawrence had asked the pope if he could resign his role in order to join a monastic order and live a life of prayer. Lawrence reveals that he desired this because he has been struggling with doubts about his faith. The pope refused Lawrence’s resignation, and so we see him reluctantly taking on the momentous task before him. As he shares a homily at the beginning of the conclave, he suddenly allows himself to speak from the heart for a moment:

“There is one sin which I have come to fear above all others—certainty. Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. Even Christ was not certain at the end, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ he cried out in his agony at the ninth hour on the cross. Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt. If there was only certainty, and no doubt, there would be no mystery, and therefore no need for faith. Let us pray that God will grant us a pope who doubts. And let him grant us a pope who sins and asks for forgiveness and who carries on.”

His speech raises the eyebrows of many of the men before him, who have come to the conclave with their own ambition to be pope, and who seem to rest in the certainty of their own perspectives.

In this sense the film is a mirror and an extension of our present day culture wars: conservatives and progressives lined up in battle formation, declaring that victory for the other side would be the worst thing imaginable, and fostering ambition under the guise of some higher moral good.

Tucci’s Cardinal Aldo Bellini is an interesting example of these tensions: he represents the progressive wing of the church against the traditionalist Italian Cardinal Todesco, who wants to drag the church back to pre-Vatican II times. In the beginning of the film, Bellini seems reluctant to advocate for his own candidacy and says that “no sane man would want to be pope”, but as the stakes rise during the film, he castigates his ally and friend Lawrence for being “ambitious” after Lawrence receives several votes, and tells him they are in “a war” (against Todesco and the conservative/traditionalist wing).

Even the doubting, power averse Lawrence is tempted by ambition at one point. When several candidates are exposed for past scandal and corruption, the contest appears to be down to Lawrence and Todesco. Lawrence wavers over voting for himself as pope, but decides to do it and is just about to cast his ballot when the chapel is rocked by a Muslim terrorist explosion from outside.

In the ensuing response, Cardinal Tedesco reveals his true ugliness by declaring that the church should enter a holy war against the “animals” that just attacked them.

He is greeted by the humble but convicting response of a character who up until that moment had only been on the fringes of the film, Cardinal Vincent Benitez, the Mexican-born Archbishop of Kabul, whom the deceased pope had appointed secretly¹ and no one knew about until he showed up for the conclave.

Benitez, who has mostly kept to himself during the conclave, addresses Todesco:

My brother cardinal, with respect, what do you know about war? I carried out my ministry in the Congo, in Baghdad and Kabul. I’ve seen the lines of the dead and wounded, Christian and Muslim. When you say we have to fight, what is it you think we’re fighting? You think it’s those deluded men who’ve carried out these terrible acts today? The thing you’re fighting is here… inside each and every one of us, if we give in to hate now, if we speak of “sides” instead of speaking for every man and woman. This is my first time here, amongst you, and I suppose it will be my last. Forgive me, but these last few days we have shown ourselves to be small petty men, we have seemed concerned only with ourselves, with Rome, with these elections, with power. But these are not the Church. The Church is not tradition. The Church is not the past. The Church is what we do next.

In response to Benitez’ powerful speech, the cardinals decide to elect him as pope. But the revelations don’t end here.

A Moment of Grace

As Cardinal Lawrence is finalizing the details of Cardinal Benitez becoming pope, he is pulled aside by his assistant O’Malley. See, earlier in the film Lawrence had asked O’Malley to find out more about the mysterious Benitez. O’Malley reveals that he discovered sometime before the conclave Benitez had an appointment at a clinic in Switzerland. When Lawrence confronts Benitez over the appointment, ready to hear another scandal come out into the light, Benitez reveals that it was for a laparoscopic hysterectomy that he never went through with. He tells Lawrence that he was born intersex, but did not realize that he also possessed female reproductive organs in his body until an appendectomy in his 30s. Benitez says to Lawrence:

It was a very dark time for me. I felt as if my entire life as a priest had been lived in a state of sin. Of course I offered my resignation to the Holy Father. I flew to Rome and I told him everything. We considered surgery to remove the female parts of my body, but the night before I was due to fly, I realized I was mistaken. I was who I had always been. It seemed to me more of a sin to change His handiwork than to leave my body as it was….I am what God made me, and perhaps it is my difference that will make me more useful. I think again of your sermon—I know what it is to exist between the world’s certainties.

Power vs. Gentleness

Benitez’ revelation highlights another theme throughout the film, which is power vs. meekness, which can sort of be mapped on to what we might call masculine vs. feminine “energies”².

The Roman Catholic church for its entire history has, of course, been led by men. Only men can be priests, only men can be cardinals, only a man can be the pope. Women of course have been able to develop monastic orders and find small ways to “lead” in the church, but always under the subservience of men. We see these dynamics play out in the film. While the cardinals seek to dominate and conquer each other via church politics, the nuns quietly serve in the background by making meals and performing domestic duties. Isabella Rosellini’s Sister Agnes has one significant scene in which she speaks to the cardinals, but only to confirm something already stated by Cardinal Lawrence, and even in her speech she acknowledges that “we sisters are supposed to be invisible”.

Throughout the film, Cardinal Todesco represents the most extreme, toxic version of male power. He wants to roll back the church to a time when men were even more powerful and women had even less of a role, he is casually racist and misogynistic, and he wants to go to war against the Muslims.

On the other side of the spectrum we have Cardinal Benitez, who also presents physically as a man, but is soft spoken, gentle, insightful, remembers the sisters in praying over a meal, and shows no desire to play the ambition games of the other cardinals. After Todesco’s angry, railing speech, Benitez’ response is polite and respectful, but weighted with conviction and moral authority.

It doesn’t really feel all that surprising then, in retrospect, that while he presents as a man, and is received by society and the church as a man, and is elected pope as a man, that as he enters into the sacred role of the Holy Pontiff, he will also bear femaleness in his body. Ironically, the physical reality of his sexuality symbolizes a kind of integration and wholeness, rather than a deficiency. Because of his intersexedness, Benitez had had to reckon with himself and his identity in a way that none of his fellow male cardinals probably ever have. It’s no accident that Benitez chooses “Innocent” as his papal name. The film’s director, Edward Berger, says of the choice, “It’s a name of purity without any preconceptions….Benitez comes to us with absolute openness.”

An Uncertain But Hopeful Future

The film doesn’t end with a nice bow. Cardinal Lawrence knows the new pope’s secret but no one else does. What will happen if the truth comes out? How will the world react? How will the other cardinals react? We don’t know. In this way the film stays true to its theme of uncertainty.

But we are also left with a glimmer of hope. Cardinal Lawrence stares out a window and watches three laughing nuns cross a courtyard below. Perhaps the new Pope Innocent, a man who also carries femaleness within him, will bring much needed change to a church that has forgotten that all—men, women, intersex, queer, Christian, Muslim—are made in God’s image and worthy of dignity and belovedness, and that all we can do at times is stand in awe before the mystery of such things.

1. A process called in pectore

2. I realize I am treading somewhat into stereotypes here, but I think there is enough truth to these stereotypes to proceed.