The Conclave is In The World and Of It

Against Ultramontane Paracletism (feat. both Conclave (2024) and Conclave (2025))

The poster for the Conclave soundtrack was much better than the one for the movie. Also, very good soundtrack!

The doings of a papal conclave are an absolute secret. The governing law of conclaves, Universi Dominic Gregis (as amended 2007; as amended 2013) prescribes this stern oath:

We, the Cardinals of Holy Roman Church, of the Order of Bishops, of Priests and of Deacons, promise, pledge and swear, as a body and individually, to observe exactly and faithfully all the norms contained in the Apostolic Constitution Universi Dominici Gregis of the Supreme Pontiff John Paul II, and to maintain rigorous secrecy with regard to all matters in any way related to the election of the Roman Pontiff or those which, by their very nature, during the vacancy of the Apostolic See, call for the same secrecy.

And I, [First Name] Cardinal [Last Name], so promise, pledge and swear. So help me God and these Holy Gospels which I now touch with my hand.

Violation of this oath is generally¹ punished by automatic excommunication. Additionally—and far worse—willful violation of an oath of this nature is a mortal sin.² Only a Judas would betray this oath, and so the only credible stories we ever hear from the inside of a conclave are the stories you would expect from a Judas, about politics and factions and so on.

Nevertheless, when I was a lad, I heard a story about the 1978 conclave that elected then-Pope (now-Saint) John Paul II. The story came festooned with disclaimers about how we couldn’t really know what happened in a conclave, and yet…

It was not an easy time for the Church. International Communism remained a powerful and implacable enemy of all religion, especially Catholicism. Meanwhile, the Church was ripping itself apart in the chaos after the Second Vatican Council: liturgical abuse was rampant, the vocations crisis at its height, and perennial Catholic teaching on contraception had inspired a full-on lay rebellion. This was also the peak of sex abuse by priests and coverups by individual bishops, although even the Church would not be aware of how systematic and widespread this was for decades. However difficult you might think the Church’s challenges are today, they ain’t a patch on what it faced in 1978.

Amid these pressures, the conclave was deadlocked (the story went) and seemed doomed to remain deadlocked for some time. Finally, the cardinals hunkered down to pray for the Holy Spirit’s guidance (as is customary after several failed ballots). None prayed more fervently than the virtually-unknown Archbishop of Krakow, Karol Wojtyła, and he remained bent forward, eyes closed, for a long time, pleading the Church’s need for a great leader in those difficult days. Slowly, however, the room fell silent. When the encroaching silence finally thickened enough for Archbishop Wojtyła to notice it, he looked up—and discovered every cardinal was looking at him. The Holy Spirit had answered, and Wojtyła was terrified by the answer. He was, reluctantly, elected Pope John Paul II on the next ballot.

I think this is, more or less, how most Catholics conceive of how a papal conclave works. The cardinals are mere men, but they are men influenced by some special power of the Holy Spirit, such that, when they act as a body, they enact the Holy Spirit’s ordaining will, or at least His guidance, or something like that.

Here is another story of a different conclave.

In 687, Pope Conon I fell mortally ill. The imperial exarch at Ravenna was a man named John Platyn. Exarch Platyn had been empowered by Byzantine Emperor Justinian II, successor of Caesar and imperator of the Romans, to confirm the election of a pope. Previously, a pope could not take office until confirmed by the emperor himself, but it could take months to receive confirmation from Byzantium, so Rome had requested this new arrangement in around 684.

Pope Conon’s archdeacon, Paschal, promised Exarch Platyn one hundred pounds of gold as a bribe to ensure Paschal’s election as pope in the coming election. Platyn had appointed many of the Roman officials who would vote in that election, and it appears to have been no great difficulty for him to compel them to vote for Paschal. However, the military supported a priest named Theodoros. When Pope Conon did indeed die on 21 September, Theodoros’s supporters seized the interior of St. John Lateran, while Paschal’s faction seized the outbuildings. They fortified their positions and attacked one another. The armed stalemate lasted a month, until a group of clerics, army officers, and judges—enjoying substantial popular support by this time—“nominated” a third candidate, a certain Father Sergius of Sta. Susanna. Unsurprisingly, Paschal’s and Theodoros’ factions were unmoved by this touching display of civic unity. So the army stormed the basilica instead. Upon seeing their overwhelming numbers, Theodoros capitulated, but Paschal was forced to accept Sergius’s “election” at the point of a sword.

The rule at the time was that popes had to be elected unanimously. Sergius was indeed “elected” “unanimously,” for certain very broad values of those terms.

Paschal secretly begged Exarch Platyn for assistance, so Platyn came to town. Upon arrival, however, the exarch found Sergius elected and serving with strong popular support, so he agreed to confirm Sergius… as long as Sergius paid him the bribe Paschal had promised him. Sergius initially refused, but eventually relented, and was finally consecrated on 15 December. He went on to oppose the Quinsext Council, extinguished the last European remnants of the Three Chapters Schism, and was eventually canonized a saint in the Catholic Church. His papacy, born at the point of a sword out of entirely un-spiritual expediency, is universally recognized as valid.

That really happened. The story about John Paul II almost certainly didn’t.

You should understand the Holy Spirit’s role in a conclave in this light.

I, a Catholic, firmly believe and profess that His Holiness the Pope, the Bishop of Rome, is the Successor of Peter the Apostle, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, and the Vicar of Jesus Christ.³ I affirm the pope’s primacy of authority and jurisdiction over the entire Christian Church, including his power, as a grace of the Holy Spirit, to infallibly define formal doctrines concerning faith and morals ex cathedra.

But the papacy ain’t beanbag. Once a pope is poped, he gains the extremely limited protections the Holy Spirit promises the papacy, but the Church has never taught that papal elections themselves are dictated, guided, or otherwise protected by the Holy Spirit in any special way.

Catholics—and especially cardinal-electors—may ask the Holy Spirit for help in choosing a good candidate, humbly and contritely. He may, in His unbounded generosity, provide it. The outcome of the conclave is His will, but it isn’t His ordaining will, which selects the best possible outcome for the best possible reasons… but rather His permissive will, which allows humans their freedom of action—even when they use that freedom badly. The Holy Spirit will ensure that, whatever we humans end up doing, it will serve His ultimate ends at the Second Coming, but, medium-term, a pope is perfectly free to be a total disaster. As Pope Benedict explained (before his papacy):

I would say that the Spirit does not exactly take control of the affair, but rather like a good educator, as it were, leaves us much space, much freedom, without entirely abandoning us. Thus the Spirit’s role should be understood in a much more elastic sense, not that he dictates the candidate for whom one must vote.

Notice: this is all true of any election. You can beg the Holy Spirit for help electing American presidents, too! Fat lot of good that did me last fall! I suspect the Spirit simply couldn’t find ten good men in Sodom this time around, so we stand chastised. Like the next pope, the second Trump Administration will, without fail, serve the Spirit’s ultimate ends at the Apocalypse… but, in the meantime, the Holy Spirit will probably not protect the Dow Jones, the due process of law, or (alas) my retirement account. Nor is the Holy Spirit likely to protect the Latin Mass, the clarity of the Church’s moral witness, or… huh, the due process of law.

So much comes down to this: will the Holy Spirit find ten good men in Rome next month? Who knows? (I am dubious.)

However, even without the automatic direction of the Holy Spirit, the modern papal electoral system is not without advantages. Indeed, I see two main ways in which the papal conclave is superior to the modern Western plebiscite. I therefore think that, even without any guarantee from the Holy Spirit, the conclave is more likely to select a good pope than, say, America is to select a good president.

#1: Good Bones

First, the papal conclave is much more intelligently structured than your average Western plebiscite. Rather than being designed to give the largest number of people the largest amount of “say” in the outcome, the conclave is designed, from first to last, to select the best candidate for the office. As I have often illustrated in these pages, the modern Western belief that more “say” equals better candidates is delusional. When selecting a chief executive, it is desirable to have… uh…

How does it go? Oh, yes:

It was equally desirable, that the immediate election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice. A small number of persons… will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations.

It was also peculiarly desirable, to afford as little opportunity as possible to tumult and disorder. This evil was not least to be dreaded in the election of a magistrate, who was to have so important an agency in the administration of the government… [T]his detached and divided situation will expose them much less to heats and ferments, which might be communicated from them to the people…

So Alexander Hamilton explained in Federalist 68. If this is desirable for a chief executive, how much moreso is it desirable for the election of an absolute monarch who unites supreme legislative, executive, and judicial power under the sovereign of both a church and a (tiny) state? The papal conclave would not meet with Hamilton’s approval (see my highly tactical use of ellipses), but the conclave has a number of key features that tend to promote good selections: a small and deliberative body, purpose-built for the occasion, appointed from among the experienced men most capable of understanding what the office requires, forced to decide by consensus (rather than bare majority), isolated from the “tumult and disorder” of popular pressure, and (it bears mentioning again) following a process that encourages frank and reasonable discussion… rather than the bald demagoguery that dominates TV ads and campaign manifestos during a mass democratic campaign.

By this, I do not mean that the conclave process is perfect. The process for selecting electors was bad the day I was born, with the personal preferences of the most recent pope playing a historically outsized role,⁴ and it became much worse during the Francis papacy.⁵ Pope St. John Paul II foolishly weakened the two-thirds majority rule for papal election, and Pope Benedict XVI foolishly neglected to fully restore it.⁶

I mean only that the conclave process was actually designed, at each stage, with the conscious desire to identify the wisest and best papal candidate, with reforms regularly adopted to minimize this or that electoral distortion. The current American election process, by contrast, has been redesigned to feed democracy’s all-consuming appetite for plebiscite, with zero attention paid to the quality of the system’s outputs, and without bothering to address even obvious distortions (like spoiler effects). The standard Westminster parliamentary election process is not much better on this score.

Because the conclave has been intentionally designed to elect a good pope, and because they have adopted many of the basic structures and rules that are advantageous to electing a good pope, we may expect the papal conclave to perform better than many rival electoral systems. Combined with prayer and fasting, the conclave might just manage to produce an outcome that is something less than disaster.

Yet mark well: this is a human system, created by humans. God did not ordain the conclave. The conclave did not exist until 1276; it did not exclude lay people until 1899. It will not last forever. Its results are as human as the results of any other election, and we can only pray to God that His influence will spare us from what we deserve.

Recent Oscar nominee Conclave (2024) highlighted the good bones of the conclave electoral system, and I heartily recommend the movie (currently included with Amazon Prime) to anyone trying to get a lay understanding of both the basic procedures and the strengths of those procedures. As frequently happens in real-life conclaves, the conclave initially seems inclined toward a certain candidate, but further deliberation among the cardinals exposes weaknesses and difficulties that lead them, ultimately, to a stronger candidate. The scandals exposed in the film are all perfectly plausible. The only part of the film I find implausible is that all these scandals would be uncovered at more or less the same time, all by the good offices of Ralph Fiennes.⁷ On the whole, it is a magnificent suspense film.

What’s missing from Conclave, however, is significant. Conclave focuses almost exclusively on the human element of the system, and it is unsparing in its mostly-justified cynicism.⁸ However, there is almost no mention of Jesus Christ. The source and summit of Catholic life, the Eucharist, is absent. We see the prayer life of the cardinals only briefly, and really only so Ralph Fiennes can give a misconceived speech on how great doubt is, for the usual stupid reasons.

This absence does not mar Conclave. The protagonists of Conclave are pretty clearly based on the St. Gallen Mafia, a group that views the Church through a notoriously political lens, whose belief in the Resurrection and the sacraments is notoriously weak, and which was very likely the source of most (perhaps all) leaked information about the 2005 and 2013 conclaves. When I wrote, at the beginning of this article, about the “Judas” who would violate a conclave’s oath of secrecy, and the stories you would expect to hear from such a Judas, these are the boys I was thinking of.

Since Conclave is told from their perspective, it’s quite natural that God is all but absent from the film. At one point, one character in the group remarks to another that he feels like he’s “in an American political convention.” He is! It is simply a convention of his own making. Meanwhile, while the St. Gallen stand-ins are smoking cigarettes in backrooms and stairwells, I’m sure the trads are off having Latin High Mass. The movie works anyway, because it tells the story of the failure of the St. Gallen style of politicking, which plunges the protagonist, Cardinal Lawrence, into a deep crisis, which is great storytelling, and has the ring of truth.

Yet, for all the movie’s accuracy in the human details, for all its well-earned cynicism, it is still missing this important dimension. While the absence of prayer does not mar Conclave (2024), it could easily mar your understanding of the actual conclave (2025).

But, lucky for you, you read this blog.

#2: Pervasive Prayer

At a conclave, prayer is built into the system.

Admittedly, this is not very compelling if you are an atheist. However, if you are almost any kind of theist,⁹ it is just obviously a good idea to ask God Or Whatever for His/Her/Its/Their assistance whenever you’re making a major collective decision of world-historic importance.

Even if you aren’t one of the ten good men in Sodom (and are you? really?), the Big Guy might do you a solid if you ask nicely and/or repent of your sins in sackcloth and ashes like the people of Nineveh. Even if you are a highly skeptical agnostic, the expected value on “including prayer in your electoral system” is almost certainly positive.¹⁰ For Roman Catholics offering petitions to the God of Roman Catholicism, especially through the Catholic Mass, the expected value of prayer is high indeed.

As we have seen, the Holy Spirit’s relationship to the conclave is no different from the Holy Spirit’s relationship to every other secular election: He will help only if sincerely and humbly asked. The conclave’s brilliant plan: give lots of opportunities for asking.

To that end, the conclave has rather a lot of prayer. By current custom, the conclave begins with a solemn Mass. The procession into the Sistine Chapel has the cardinals sing the litany of the saints. Once in the chapel, they chant Veni Creator Spiritus. They swear their oaths of secrecy on the Gospel. A preacher then leads them in a meditation and prayer. Then they vote. The cardinals themselves are priests, bound to the ancient discipline of praying the liturgy of the hours five times a day—and, during the conclave, they pray the hours of compline and vespers together. They say another Mass at the start of each day of balloting. They pray again at the end of each ballot. The Church’s governing law for conclaves is about 25 pages long. The Church’s prayer book for conclaves is nearly 400 pages long. In this, the cardinals are supported by the daily prayers of the Church throughout the world. This is smart, and the Holy Spirit will help, to greater or lesser extent, if asked sincerely and humbly.

If your sole guide to the conclave is Conclave (2024), you will miss basically all this, but it is arguably the conclave’s single most important feature and most powerful advantage.

On the other hand… every Catholic Church in America already prays daily for the wisdom and goodness of America’s political leaders, and look where that’s got us. Catholics pray for world leaders all over the world, and look at the world! This suggests that even the most sincere prayers only get us so far.

Sure, it could be a lot worse. Without our prayers, I’m sure everything in the world would suck a lot harder. And, hey, it’s not like the rosary ladies in the back row have never collected a scalp.¹¹

However, prayer is not a panacea where we still allow evil to thrive. We cannot pray for the salvation of our nation out one side of our mouths, pull the lever for taxpayer-funded abortions or deportation ASMR with the other, and expect the prayer to be answered. Likewise, in light of the abuse scandals which have touched so many of the voting cardinals, the Ordo Rituum Conclavis should perhaps pull a Nineveh and add sackcloth and ashes to the conclave’s liturgical rubric.

Even when prayers are granted, they are not often granted in the way that we expect. Well before the 2013 conclave, I had become concerned about the way traditionalist-leaning Catholics like me had started treating Vatican documents like Holy Scripture, wielding quotes from Donum Vitae or Ex Corde Ecclesiae like proof texts. I am a great admirer of both documents, but I came to believe that traditionalist Catholic reverence for the pope (and, relatedly, the bishops) had come untethered from historical Catholic belief and practice. We had been spoiled by decades of truly great theology pouring out from St. Peter’s Square, but even a little knowledge of papal history showed how anomalous that was. So, without telling a soul, I quietly prayed, just before the 2013 conclave began, that we would be given a pope who would help traditionalist Catholics unlearn their dependence on the papacy.

To my chagrin, my prayer was answered. Two or three or four years after the conclave, I filed a follow-up prayer: “No, not like that!” Such is the life of prayer. I accept my share of responsibility for the Francis papacy, and I apologize for any inconvenience and/or you’re welcome.

Many of Catholic critics of Conclave (2024) (and there were plenty! spoiler alert if you click any of ‘em!) pointed out, correctly, that Conclave had entirely missed the prayerful dimension of the conclave. Yet most took this criticism too far in the other direction. Where Conclave itself erased the cardinals’ plaintive requests for divine aid, these critics erase the conclave’s human freedom and its all-too-human predilection to sin—and the particular sinfulness of this particular group of elderly ideologues.¹² These critics misunderstand how God responds to prayer, and why. They accept the cardinals’ own self-serving narratives at face value. This all adds up to the old pious error: the critics think Conclave (2024) was bad because it depicted a human election, whereas (they contend) a papal conclave is somehow specially guided by the Holy Spirit.

It isn’t. A papal conclave is an election like any other. On a good day, the outcome depends on good humans exercising good judgment and prudent discernment within sturdy electoral systems designed by smart humans. On a bad day, the conclave’s result is determined by the army storming the basilica to put a stop to cardinal-on-cardinal violence and consecrating the military’s candidate at the point of a gun. The Holy Spirit promises nothing special in this election, and gives only when begged… and then not always in the way you expect. De Civitate will cover this conclave accordingly.

The Holy Spirit offers the Church only one special reassurance: that the whole thing cannot be totally ruined. If we steer the barque of Peter into an iceberg next month, that’s on us, corporately. If, as a result, the Church implodes, and, in a hundred years, there are only seventy-five Catholics left in the world, all living in the suburbs of Topeka, Kansas—but their reckless, idiot pope has not formally taught error—then Christ’s promises have been kept.

The rest is up to us.

Of course, the time for major reforms was two years before the conclave, not two weeks before. There is not much left for us to do now, except count on the (basically sound) design of the conclave, fret about the (basically unsound) composition of the electorate, and pray.

So pray. Go to confession. Fast, despite the Easter feast. Maybe order sackcloth on Etsy.¹³ Then pray some more.

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Programming Notes: Long-time readers, family, and friends know that I usually run a papal betting pool, partly for fun, partly as an opportunity to compile dossiers¹⁴ about the papabile to educate myself and my friends.

However, we now live in a world with both extremely rich reporting about the papabile (I recommend collegeofcardinalsreport.com) and very robust online betting markets (as of today, Polymarket is full of dumb money and therefore opportunities for arbitrage). Meanwhile, my audience has grown dramatically, to the point where a “just for fun” betting pool might be impractical. On the other hand, a “just for fun” betting pool is one way to make sure you aren’t cheated by cardinals doing insider trading!

I am therefore still mulling whether to run a pool this year, and, if so, how. If I decide to proceed, you can expect more information in a few days.

N.B.: there is no Catholic rule against betting on the conclave, at least as long as we have no influence over the outcome. However, it must be undertaken in a healthy spirit.

I am reluctant to open a betting pool, or dig deep into the details of this conclave at all, before the 9-day mourning period for Francis has ended. He was our spiritual father, I mourn him, and I pray for him. However, I see the cardinals just extended the mourning period / rescheduled it / scheduled it normally but I misunderstood how it worked, so that the mourning period now extends almost to the day the conclave starts, so I no longer think this self-restriction is practical. Certainly, the rest of the Catholic press has not hesitated to talk papabili.

1. As Dr. Ed Peters explained prior to the 2005 conclave, no human juridical penalty attaches to a cardinal-elector who violates the oath of secrecy. (It is still a mortal sin, with all the divine penalties that entails.)

Pope Benedict’s 2013 amendments to Universi Domenici Gregis upgraded the human penalty for anyone else who violates the oath of secrecy, from “sanction under Canon 1399” to “automatic excommunication.” However, to my eyes, he does not appear to have attached any new human penalty to the crime for cardinals who do the same.

2. Excommunication is a juridical penalty that makes it unlawful for you to access any of the sacraments. Since the sacraments are the efficacious signs of grace by which we ordinarily draw closer to God in this life, losing them is both painful and spiritually dangerous. It is an extreme sanction designed to warn the sinner through undeniable, immediate consequences that he has really, truly crossed a red line and that he must turn back or risk his soul. Excommunication is nearly always a penalty for especially egregious mortal sins.

However, mortal sin is worse. A person who dies having committed a mortal sin, with full knowledge of what he is doing and full consent to do it anyway, without later repenting, has chosen to turn away from Christ, will find himself incapable of repenting in the next life, and will therefore flee into Hell. He will rebel eternally, and, by being separated from the God for whom he was made, will suffer in every moment of that rebellion.

Technically, you can go to heaven under an excommunication. For example, if the excommunication was issued in error, accusing you of a mortal sin you did not commit; or if you repent of the mortal sin but for bureaucratic reasons can’t get the excommunication lifted; or if a powerful prelate just excommunicates you out of spite on a trumped-up charge. The path to Heaven will be harder without the sacraments, but it is doable. However, a truly mortal sin, without repentance, means no Heaven. (This is worse.)

3. I also believe he is Patriarch of the West, despite the Vatican’s bizarre attempt to extinguish the title. I have just learned, while writing this footnote, that Pope Francis pseudo-restored the title in April 2024, although in a backhanded way, which is typical of even the good things in the Francis papacy.

4. This is partly because the papacy has completely centralized power over the appointment of bishops, something it was not only unable to do for the first nineteen hundred years of Catholicism, but mostly had no interest in doing. Since most cardinals in the late twentieth century were simply the bishops of important dioceses, power to select bishops of those dioceses was effectively the power to select a cardinal-elector. To be fair, there are limited procedural constraints on selecting diocesan bishops, like the ternae and the reliability of the local apostolic nuncio.

5. Pope Francis largely abandoned even the pretense of letting national churches influence or select their own cardinals. If an important, cardinal-ranked diocese had a bishop not to Pope Francis’s liking, Francis simply refused to give out the red hat, bypassed the cardinalatial see, and elevated a different bishop more to his liking.

For example, Francis made Archbishop Charles Chaput the first bishop of Philadelphia in history NOT to be made cardinal since Philadelphia was raised to a cardinalatial see, despite a sterling resume. (Chaput is perceived as a conservative. I liked his book.) Meanwhile, Francis elevated Bishop Robert McElroy of San Diego, which is not even an archdiocese, apparently because of the widespread perception that McElroy is more progressive, thus more Francis-aligned.

This happened constantly, throughout the world, and means the current college of cardinals has a lot more people from Francis’s faction than you would expect from a random sampling of bishops, or even from the JP2/B16 era (where the popes routinely felt obligated to make a cardinal out of one of their enemies). This was one of many ways Francis’s actual governance undermined his oft-touted synodality. I think the Church does need more synodality, but the Francis papacy was a bad place to look for it.

6. Pope Benedict partially restored the two-thirds rule. In the first thirty-three ballots, a two-thirds majority is required to win, and cardinals are free to vote for any male Catholic. Neither John Paul nor Benedict changed this.

John Paul’s “reform” was that, after thirty-two ballots, a pope could be elected with a simple majority, which obviously lowers the effective threshold for election to a simple majority: any bare majority of the college of cardinals that can simply hold on to its members for thirty-three ballots is guaranteed the papacy. Benedict saw the flaw and hit ctrl-z on it.

Now, after thirty-three ballots, a two-thirds majority is still required… but, thanks to Benedict’s “reform,” the cardinals are forced to a runoff election between the top two vote-getters. By preventing the cardinals from seeking a compromise candidate after a deadlock, I think it risks creating more deadlock than it solves, and it encourages both extremism and stubbornness to boot.

Remember that it was the belief that he still had a chance that led William McAdoo to stay in the hunt for the 1924 Democratic presidential nomination for a hundred and three ballots over sixteen sweltering days in Chicago, instead of doing what he should have done fifty ballots earlier: withdraw and accept a compromise candidate.

7. Like any Hollywood movie, there are plenty of details to annoy those knowledgeable enough to notice. Daniel Quinan, a canon lawyer in my archdiocese, deftly unpacks each of the canonical controversies that have swirled around the film in his recent article, “The Conclave Shockwave”:

The "Conclave" Shockwave

Much noise has been made about a certain Cardinal Benitez’s late admission to the conclave as a cardinal in pectore, which is facially incorrect (but immaterial to the plot and canonically a more interesting question than it first appears). The scene that really ground my gears was the one where Cardinal Lawrence confronted another cardinal with information about that cardinal that Lawrence had just gleaned under the seal of confession. I’m not saying that this couldn’t happen at a conclave, especially given what we know of Cardinal Lawrence. Heck, I’ve personally seen priests play too fast and loose with the seal of confession, despite its status as the single most fiercely guarded Catholic right, carrying absurdly harsh penalties for its violation. However, the movie doesn’t seem to even realize that Lawrence has very possibly violated the seal. Gahhh.

On the other hand, there are several details that reward knowledgeability as well. The movie never clearly identifies the dead pope or his ideological valence. However, to those in the know, it is obvious that the dead pope is supposed to be Francis. We know this because the building he lives (and dies) in is clearly the Domus Sanctae Marthae, not the papal apartments adjoining St. Peter’s. The only pope in history to make his residence in specifically the Domus Sanctae Marthae was Francis.

There is also a moment most of the way into the movie where those of you versed in the debates over Vatican II won’t be able to resist turning to your partner and joking, “Well, that’s one way to do aggiornimento!” (The moment involves a window opening in the Sistine Chapel.)

Many complaints have been lodged about… well…

MAJOR SPOILER ALERT!

One of the cardinal-electors turns out to have been born with a uterus. Many Catholics have lambasted this revelation as being some kind of trans manifesto. They insist that the cardinal in question has invalid Holy Orders (and is therefore not even a priest, much less a cardinal), because the cardinal is biologically female, and Holy Orders is available only to males, therefore the cardinal in question should have been instantly excluded once his (her?) birth defect was discovered. However, this hasty conclusion betrays either not having seen the movie, or not knowing Catholic law on biological sex. It is made clear in dialogue that the cardinal in question has externally male genitalia, which, throughout his life, appeared to him and to everyone else to be fully functional. He was therefore, at least as far as the movie gives us evidence, capable of performing the male role in a complete act of sexual intercourse. In Catholic law, this makes him male! (A male with XX chromosomes is still male.) His orders are valid. This whole controversy was silly, and it was more than a little embarrassing for so many local pastors to preach against the movie the week it came out—not only by announcing a major spoiler to their congregations, but while getting the facts wrong. Perhaps this whole subplot was intended by the writers as some kind of trans manifesto. Nevertheless, that’s not how it played out.

END OF MAJOR SPOILER ALERT

Anyway, for every detail the movie got wrong (or only questionably right), there’s two more it nailed, at cinematic scale, and that’s delightful to watch.

8. There is one completely false note in Conclave: in order to make the traditionalist cardinal both unappealing and unelectable, the writers make him subtly but unmistakably racist against brown people. There is plenty in radtrad Catholicism that is genuinely unhealthy without needing to make them out to be American-style racists. (Of course, there’s plenty unhealthy about other factions, too.)

Even if you insist on taking the racist route, trads are a lot more likely to have a problem with Jews than Africans, because plenty of them are still mad about Nostra Aetate. Problem with that is, ever since the October 7 attacks on Israel, I don’t think Hollywood believes anti-Semitism is villainous anymore.

So instead, in order to make the traditionalist Italian into The Bad Guy, they had to make him racist against a conservative African. Meanwhile, every actual traditionalist I know would give a finger, if not a whole hand, to see Cardinal Sarah or Cardinal Turkson, both Black Africans, elected pope.

9. Hardline deists deny that petitionary prayer can have any effect, but mostly everybody else says it’s a good idea, even the non-Christians.

10. I am not endorsing Pascal’s Wager, a much more comprehensive set of claims about belief. I’m not suggesting belief. I’m only suggesting that skeptical prayer is +EV.

11. The Soviet Union dissolved on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception.

12. A fun activity is to open the list of voting cardinals published by El Pais, scroll at random, and google the name with “abuse” after. The very first one I tried (de Kesel) turned out to have the usual problems in his background, although the next one (Garcia Rodriguez) did not.

Note that cardinals from the English-speaking world are more likely to show up on Google and that cardinals from the developed world, especially North America and Europe, are more likely to have been investigated, but this does not mean the others are clean.

A small caution: as the trial, conviction, and ultimate acquittal of Cardinal Pell showed, not every allegation, and not even every conviction, matches up to actual wrongdoing. (Pell was not acquitted on a technicality. The core of the case against him was incoherent, and the appeals courts found that no fair jury could have convicted.)

Nevertheless, in this field, most smoke is caused by fire. The American McCarrick Network was real and is very well-represented at this conclave, thanks specifically to Pope Francis’s targeted appointments of McCarrick protégés to the College of Cardinals… which he accomplished by bypassing the normal American cardinalatial sees, exactly as I complained about just a few footnotes ago.

13. Full disclosure: I am not going to do this.

14. There is a note in that document about how “the ways of men are not the ways of the Holy Spirit,” implying that the Holy Spirit plays some special role in the election. Given the thesis of today’s article, I obviously recant this. I was being cute. I certainly know better today, and I am pretty sure I knew better back then, too.