From the Jul/Aug, 2025 issue of *Touchstone*

Quodlibet

A Transitional Conclave

by S. M. Hutchens

The Conclave is a 2024 film directed by Edward Berger from a screenplay by Peter Straughan, starring Ralph Fiennes (Lawrence), Sergio Castellitto (Tedesco), John Lithgow (Tremblay), and Isabella Rossellini (Sr. Agnes).

A highly acclaimed dramatization of the 2016 novel by Robert Harris, the film depicts a fictional papal election after the death of a pope whose theatrical corpse is made up to look like John Paul II. Fiennes, a consummate actor, plays the dean of the college of cardinals, who is responsible for organizing the event. The acting is uniformly excellent, the details of the sets superbly realistic. The plot, however, is no more than a cartoonish liberal fantasy from start to finish. Despite all the stage gravitas and well-executed religious palaver, this is not a serious film: it is built upon caricature, implausibility, and wishful progressivist thinking.

It seems that, before his death, the pope had authorized the sudden appearance of a cardinal he had made in pectore (secretly, unknown to the rest of the college). The chief villain of the piece is a boorish, traditionalist reactionary (Tedesco), intent on becoming pope and returning the Church to a narrow and bigoted past. The conclave is fully stocked with cardinals both ambitious and unprincipled. At an advanced point in the deliberations, bombs triggered by Muslim terrorists begin exploding in Rome and elsewhere, and the conservative element, led by the nasty cardinal, who is ahead in the balloting, is advocating a bloody crusade against Islam even as the conclave is dissolving in partisan confusion. The heretofore unknown cardinal then arises like Peter in their midst, surrounded by a luminous aura; he reproves the college for lacking a Christlike attitude toward Islam, and makes such an impression that he is immediately elected pope as the wind of the Spirit blows through the bomb-shattered chapel windows.

The newly elected pope tells Cardinal Lawrence that he will choose the papal name “Innocent.” When confronted privately after the election with the report that he had gone to Switzerland for a surgical procedure that he eventually declined to undergo, he discloses that the planned operation was a hysterectomy. The pontiff is a woman who could pass for a man, and rather than being de-sexed by the operation, had chosen to affirm in faith what God made him/her and see what the Almighty had in store, while she maintained the pretense ex cathedra.

As I said—a sententious progressivist fantasy and not a serious film—recommended for the sort of people who think such things are a good lesson in what should be for bigoted reactionaries who don’t understand Nice.

S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.

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