The pope is dying, and I can’t stop thinking about ‘Conclave’
What is the use of liberal art in an age of fascism?
Just days before the 2024 election, “Conclave” released in the U.S. Based on a 2016 novel by Robert Harris, the Edward Berger film follows Cardinal Thomas Lawrence, the dean of the College of Cardinals, as he leads the conclave in electing the new pope. Like most media and art I watch and read, I watched it late, squeezing it in only days before the 2025 Oscars.
It’s a delightfully fun movie. It’s well paced and acted, dramatic with an edge of dry humor, and visually stunning. My friends and I screamed at thee vape hit and the third-act copier scene. All of which is to say, I am a certified “Conclave” enjoyer. Still, when another friend who had already seen it asked me what I thought of it, I told them that the film “is very fun. presents catholicism with more optimism than it deserves, but very fun [sic].”
Obligatory “Conclave” summary
The movie twists and turns as new information comes to light about two of the frontrunners for pope. Despite being sequestered, Cardinal Lawrence uncovers a sexual scandal and simony (selling church offices) that place Cardinal Goffredo Tedesco, an unwavering traditionalist, in the lead. Lawrence, however, is among the liberal faction, taking secret meetings with Cardinal Aldo Bellini, a progressive whose early lead quickly falters, to strategize against Tedesco.
After the voting process is interrupted by a suicide bomber attacking the Sistine Chapel, the cardinals convene in a nearby auditorium. Light shines from above where the cardinals sit, still covered in dust and blood, but the periphery is dark. Tedesco stands and delivers a forceful speech about the dangers of relativism and the necessity of a firm hand at the helm of the Church. Though the race or religion of the bomber is never revealed, Tedesco’s call for war is explicit in its racism and religious discrimination against Muslims. But then, Cardinal Vincent Benitez speaks.
A soft-spoken man, Benitez arrived to the Vatican late in an air of mystery. As the election narrows to favor moderate Cardinal Joseph Tremblay and Tedesco, he reveals that he voted for Lawrence, and despite Lawrence’s urging, he refuses to change his vote strategically to block Tedesco. He is a man of principle, and his third-act speech unfolds accordingly. In English, he asks Tedesco what he knows of war, of the people who will be hurt the most by Tedesco’s scorching hatred, and, switching to Spanish, he affirms his own desire to see a Church that will serve everyone:
“Forgive me, but these last few days we have shown ourselves to be small and petty men. We have seemed concerned only with ourselves, with Rome, with these elections, with power. But these things are not the Church. The Church is not a tradition. The Church is not the past. The Church is what we do next.”
When the cardinals return to the Sistine Chapel, they carry white umbrellas, an echo of a previous shot of their black umbrellas and a symbol of their agreement in who should be the next pope. It’s a beautiful and poignant shot—most of the artistic choices in this movie are laden with symbolism—and it imbues the end of the movie with an air of calm inevitability. Benitez is elected pope and accepts, choosing the name Innocent. Lawrence learns that Benitez’ mysteriously canceled trip to a clinic in Switzerland was for a hysterectomy, and when he confronts Benitez about it, Benitez reveals he is intersex and that the previous pope affirmed his decision to forgo a hysterectomy. He tells Lawrence, “I am what God made me.”
In a time when transgender rights are under attack from the religious right, gender-affirming care is increasingly difficult to access, and the T in LGBTQIA+ is being erased, “Conclave” feels like a radical stance. Not only do trans and intersex people exist, the movie tells us, they exist by God’s will. It is a direct contradiction to Christian “justifications” for transphobia, which rest on the interpretation of doctrine that only two binary genders (and heterosexuality) are God’s will. Benitez feels like an optimistically imagined version of what Pope Francis, a relatively liberal pope, could have been, or at least what he could lay the groundwork for.
Pope Francis is dying
Popes tend to be old by the time they’re elected, with the average age hovering around 64 (though Pope John XII might have been as young as 18 when he was elected). So it should come as no surprise that popes typically serve about a decade before dying or, in very rare cases, resigning. And yet I can’t fully come to terms with the fact that our current Holy Father, elected in 2013 at the tender age of 76, is dying.
I doubt that Berger knew Francis would be dying on the eve of the Oscars, when buzz around the movie would already be at its height. It makes the film feel more urgent, and those who wish to see a more liberal or progressive Church might hope that the movie is prescient beyond its timing. Though I was raised Catholic, I haven’t been a believer (or practitioner) in more than a decade. It’s hard to shake those traditions, though, to not feel those beliefs even if they don’t solidify into action or speech. They are like muscle memory, tugging at my mind and spirit. Despite its flaws and the harm it’s inflicted, I also hope for a better, kinder, more caring Church.
It’s even harder not to see Francis’ impending death in the context of the rise of fascism and nationalism across the world. Even before being elected as pope, he was known for his humility and refusal to indulge in the wealth of the Church. He never blessed gay marriage or divorce, but he refused to condemn them and instead allowed gay or divorced people to receive Communion (NB: for Catholics, this is the litmus test of whether the Church accepts your behavior). Though he condemned abortion, he acknowledged and apologized for previous systemic sexual abuse and participating in Indigenous genocide through boarding schools. Francis was far from perfect, but the potential devastation of an outright traditionalist (also known as a TradCath) pope is terrifying. Still, I can’t help but wonder: when we seek (or find) hope in a movie like “Conclave,” what is it that we’re hoping for?
The shortcomings of liberal art
When the 2016 election was called, I was sitting in my sophomore-year dorm room. The only light came from the small yellow bulb in the underside of my desk hutch and from my laptop screen, where the red line had just crossed 270.
In the following days, I started rewatching “The West Wing.” I hadn’t watched the show since high school, when my AP U.S. Government teacher showed us episodes to fill classtime. An Aaron Sorkin project, its episodes often feature Sorkin’s signature speeches that cut through the narrative tension and provide a clear resolution—or, at least, provide reassurance to the viewer that there is still some sense in the world. In the wake of Trump’s first election, I desperately wanted that reassurance. But when I sat down to watch it, I couldn’t get past the first few episodes.
Though the show began its run in the last of the Clinton years, it became a balm for liberals during the Bush era, ending halfway through his second term. Afterwards, Obama’s victories in 2008 and 2012 felt like an embodiment of Sorkin’s liberal logic: a well-spoken man could convince the country to unite behind a vision for a better world. That is, if you ignored the effigies of Obama that conservatives burned and hanged, if you turned a blind eye to the alt-right online pipeline that turned misogyny and racism into full-blown fascism and white supremacy, if you dismissed the rise of nationalist groups as fringe efforts that were too small to matter. When Trump was elected in 2016, it became clear just how many people had bought into the liberal dream that “common sense” would prevail again. After all, fascism could never happen here. Until it did.
By the time I tried to rewatch “The West Wing,” too much had changed since I’d been in high school—about the world and myself. But for the next few years, it felt like people were waking up to the reality of fascism and the need to fight it. More and more people on the left seemed disillusioned by the Democratic Party’s vague, empty promises and its prioritization of fundraising over meaningful action. Issues like workers’ rights, single-payer health care, housing reform, queer and trans rights, and police abolition (or, at the very least, defunding) entered the public discourse in a way I’d never seen growing up. And yet, in November 2024, Trump was elected again.
Throughout “Conclave,” we see just how many cardinals are willing to support deeply conservative candidates. Though Tedesco and Joshua Adeyemi, a conservative cardinal from Nigeria, only receive a few dozen votes collectively in the first round, their leads quickly grow, to the point that their combined votes easily clear the requisite two-thirds majority. Whether the cardinals who change their votes do so because they truly believe in Tedesco’s or Adeyemi’s views or they want to end the conclave as soon as possible, the result is the same. And yet, after Benitez’ single well-spoken speech, enough cardinals change their votes for him to win.
This feels charitable, and that’s being generous. The Church is known for its conservatism, which is part of why many see Francis as a radical. But even accepting this significant change of heart (and politic) on the part of a majority of individual cardinals, there is a deep level of optimism about the Church that the film takes as a basic premise.
Just as “The West Wing” believes in the system of the U.S. government, “Conclave” fundamentally believes in the system of the Catholic Church. Despite critiques of the Church littered throughout the movie of its sexual abuse, its anti-abortion and anti-women views, and its racism and religious prejudice, the cardinals rise above being small and petty and choose “correctly.” But who are they to choose at all?
There is a deep failure of imagination in liberal projects like Sorkin’s and Berger’s. Consistent with liberal politics, these projects have an abiding belief in the ability of systems to deliver “progress.” They believe in the rationality of systems reliant on big men making important decisions. They believe that, with enough information, these big men will make the correct ones. And time and time again, we’ve seen that this framework is wrong.
Liberal art like “The West Wing” and “Conclave” imagines a world where we still have to rely on people in positions of disproportionate power to decide whether we have basic rights. Despite rules about checks and balances, it imagines a world where the conversations that determine these decisions happen behind closed doors. It’s a deeply individualistic view, but maybe that’s always been part of its appeal. Not just that big men will make the right decision, but that because big men are making these decisions, we don’t have to do anything.
People like Trump and adult TradCath convert Vice President J.D. Vance do not rise to power in a vacuum. We cannot keep deluding ourselves that they are aberrations of otherwise good systems. The same systems that promise “progress” by raising people like Obama and Francis to office also allow, encourage, and sometimes require ecological devastation, systemic poverty, police violence, and rampant sexual abuse. We have to imagine beyond the systems that are in place.
I spent the better part of my 20s in Pittsburgh, a city that is more than 33% Catholic (the national average is 19.7%) and the hometown of Fred Rogers. Every time a tragedy or disaster occurs, this quote of Rogers’ circulates: “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’”
I’ve seen it interpreted as a heartening encouragement that there are always people doing the right thing in times of chaos and violence, but the interpretation I like more is to seek out the people already helping and then go help them. There are already mutual aid groups, abortion funds, and other food and housing collectives that exist outside of traditional systems of aid. There are already unions and seasoned organizers. Join them. Learn from them. Teach the next group of people looking to join. I know that no one has time, no one has money, no one has the mental or emotional bandwidth. But let’s be so for real right now: do you think you’ll have more time or money or bandwidth when the fascists are at your door?
Personal updates
February is about to give way to March, which means, according to that depressed newscaster, we’re going to make it through the year. I certainly hope so, at least. The month has felt consumed by work on various projects that feel on the brink of fruition, and I’ll admit that it’s been a frustrating, dispiriting place to linger. Still, there were some moments of fun. I hosted a movie night at my apartment and finally watched “Oldboy.” I was part of the crowd that flooded Philly’s streets when the Eagles won the Super Bowl. I went swimming at a friend’s indoor pool party and won a few chicken fights. I finished reading “Rebecca.” And, best of all, Toaster has finally gotten more consistent in using his litter boxes again. Thanks for getting through February with me. Until next time <3
