By Michael O’Brien
Already the recipient of multiple nominations for various movie and TV award ceremonies, Conclave dramatises a fictional papal election and paints an entertaining picture of the Catholic Church as a highly factionalised institution.
Based on a 2016 novel written by British author Robert Harris, the story unfolds from the vantage point of Cardinal Lawrence, played by Ralph Fiennes, who is responsible for the task of conducting the Papal conclave (election) after the death of a ‘liberal’ pope.
The method of election involves the cardinals who make up the electorate voting in successive rounds until one candidate achieves at least two-thirds of the vote. There is no open, organised discussion and debate in this electoral process. Instead, the time between each round of voting is filled with informal lobbying and backbiting.
The candidates that emerge in the contest cover a spectrum within the narrow limits of the Catholic Church – a fundamentally conservative patriarchal institution. It includes traditional conservatives Cardinal Tedesco from Italy and Nigerian Cardinal Adeyemi; ‘liberals’ American Cardinal Bellini and Canadian Trembley, the unwilling ‘liberal’ candidate and principal character Cardinal Lawrence; and finally (and most improbably) Afghan-based Mexican Cardinal Benitez.
Cardinal Benitez resembles most closely what would have been recognised between the 1960s and the 1980s as the liberation theology wing of the Church. Liberation theology was a minority trend in the Catholic Church, heavily centred but not exclusively in Latin America, that sought, within the parameters of Catholic doctrine, to foreground the concerns of the oppressed and spoke to the language of social justice. Among a cohort of priests and nuns, it represented a relatively progressive reaction to their witnessing of the material conditions of working class and poor.
The most committed to this trend of Catholicism ultimately were on a collision course with reactionary regimes in Latin America, sometimes resulting in high-profile assassinations such as that of Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was shot dead in El Salvador in 1980.
The ultra-reactionary cold warrior Pope John Paul II prioritised the suppression of liberation theology, the most high-profile episode of which came when he visited Nicaragua during the civil war to support the pro-Contra conservative wing of the church. There, he publicly castigated priests who supported the then radical leftist Sandinista regime.
The crushing of the liberation theology wing reinforced a monolithic conservative church thas rightly seen as being remote from the lives of the poor and oppressed in the Global South. This unintentionally created a space for evangelical protestant rivals who in the decades since, have made massive inroads in Latin America and Africa at the Catholic Church’s expense.
One of the outdated aspects of the portrayal of the various candidates is the ascribing of ‘liberal’ values to the American cardinal when in reality, the hierarchy in the US is currently the most conservative, typically pro-Trump and most open in opposition to the current pope for his perceived ‘liberalism’.
As the papal election unfolds, various candidates take the lead and are then effectively eliminated as skeletons emerge from secret children to plain corruption. Terrorist incidents occurring while the election is ongoing feed into the conservative vs. ‘liberal’ debate and the only open debate among the cardinals in the whole process.
This debate decides the ultimate winner of the contest. From a purely dramatic perspective, the finale is gripping, and the final twist is highly imaginative and entertaining but impossible to conceive as occurring in the church. While the author of the novel upon which this film is based claims that he ran a draft of the text by the now deceased British Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor and was told by the cardinal that the backstabbing among his peers described was accurate, the movie itself has attracted the accusation from some Church quarters, especially in the US that it is anti-Church.
If anything, the opposite can be said. The film overstates the ‘diversity’ of the hierarchy in a way, alongside the ending, that conveys a message to progressive Catholics that they have a stake in hanging in there.
