Conclave highlights the elusiveness of infallibility

I was raised Baptist and my church felt like my second home. In addition to choir rehearsal and Bible Study during the week, I was there every Sunday with my family from 9:00 to 1:30. I stopped going to church when I went to college and actually felt liberated from the more than half-day Sunday service. So, when we broached the topic of declining church attendance during a graduate seminar in the late ‘90s, I humorously speculated that long services could be the reason for the decline.

Church attendance has been shrinking since the 1990s. Gallup studies this phenomenon regularly. Its most recent report shows that 30% of people in the U.S. attend religious services on a weekly basis, which is down from 42% 20 years ago. Adding to this phenomenon, Pew Research reported in 2009 that 17% of people claimed to be agnostic, atheist, or “nothing in particular.” Ten years later, 1 out of every 4 indicated as such.

Individuals and families are often blamed for problematic social phenomena. But I’ve been considering what responsibilities the institutions themselves have for declining attendance and perhaps even diminishing faith? As I watched Conclave, these decades-old questions began to swirl in my mind once again.

Conclave’s inciting incident is the sudden death of the sitting pope. Ralph Fiennes headlines the film as Cardinal Lawrence, the pope’s dear and trusted friend. Soon after arriving at the Vatican, Lawrence learns of the Holy Father’s written order that he lead the Catholic church’s traditional conclave to select a new pope. Distraught but touched by his friend’s trust, Cardinal Lawrence carries on his duties by first summoning all the cardinals from across the globe to the Vatican for the proceedings. Consulting with Lawrence is Cardinal Bellini, a close friend and confidant of he and the late pope’s, played by Stanley Tucci.

In case you’re unaware, a conclave is the process whereby Catholic cardinals appoint a new pope after the one in office has resigned or passed away. During this time, the cardinals are sequestered to the Vatican’s campus to avoid any outside influences on their decisions. The meeting itself is held nearby in the Sistine Chapel, where the cardinals' exchanges and votes are kept secret, and their notes and ballots are burned at the end of each session to ensure their inviolability. Black chimney smoke from the burnings signal to Catholic faithful that a decision on a new pope has not yet been reached, while white smoke indicates that a pope has been selected. The process can run from days to years.

During their stay, each cardinal has a private room in the large dormitory on the Vatican’s campus. They eat meals together in an airy, spacious dining hall, while dressed in clean and starched robes and zucchettos. Isabella Rossellini plays the tough, stubborn, and protective Sister Agnes in Conclave, who leads the group of international nuns called in to support the cardinals’ domestic needs in the form of cooking and cleaning. Interestingly, their role is little different than that of most women in the secular world. That Sister Agnes is tight-lipped, stern-faced, and has few lines in the film signals the nuns’ narrow and traditional functions in the midst of a group of men with prestige and who each has authority over them. We know this for sure when she cracks a slight smile as one of the cardinals acknowledges the sisters during a prayer over the food, thanking God for the sisters who prepared it.

On the one hand, the gathering of the cardinals brings to mind domestic and international college students converging on campuses for the start of fall semester. Like predominantly White college campuses, the Vatican has a predominance of White cardinals with a smattering of cardinals of color. Together, like students, the group is diverse in nationality. On the other hand, the setting feels like a high school with a strict dress code and beginning its first week of classes for the semester. Early on, there are smiles, hugs, and a bit of catch-up after the summer away from one another. And over time, they form cliques, secrets are revealed, and voice is given to what were once implicit biases. Quickly, we learn from this film that what we often view as perfect in religious institutions is far from it when we get to observe the goings-on in its inner sanctum.

The movie reveals that conclave proceedings are more like politics than a process we might imagine as steeped in prayer, humility, and melancholy. While the cardinals are serious about the task at hand, for many, their own aspirations to be king — oh, sorry — pope, are top of mind. And those who insist they have no such ambitions, well, we learn differently not only when their names suddenly appear on the ballot, but especially as their names begin to drop in the number of votes they receive. 

When Lawrence suggests to Bellini early on that he is likely to succeed the pope, Bellini is modestly surprised and insists he doesn’t want it. But when his voting numbers begin to slip, he becomes indignant about the people who move ahead of him on the ballot. He even accuses Lawrence of wanting the papacy for himself despite his name not appearing on the ballot. So much for being close friends!

Different from Bellini’s initial modesty, other cardinals are not shy in expressing their desire to be head of the Catholic Archdiocese. Cardinal Tremblay, who is played by John Lithgow, not only insists he should be the next pope, but he has a cadre of cardinals who agrees with him and votes in his favor. When Lawrence asks Tremblay if there is any truth to an allegation he learned from a priest who came to see him at the Vatican, Tremblay responds as if he’d been accused of blasphemy – “Oh God, of course not!” But as he does with others who throw their zucchettos in the ring, Lawrence instructs his assistant to conduct a background investigation on the cardinal. When he confronts him with his findings, Tremblay is forced to moderate his arrogance and swallow his indignation. 

Cardinal Wozniak, played by Jacek Koman, is openly racist and xenophobic, once even proclaiming in his native Italian, “We tolerate Islam in our land, but they revile us in theirs. What we need is a leader who believes that we are facing a true religious war. … We need a leader who fights these animals.” While this sounds more like a military zealot than a priest, Wozniak too has a cadre of cardinals who sides with him and casts votes in his favor. But when his bigotry is confronted by an unlikely source, his run too is short-lived. Even the Black cardinals get behind Cardinal Adeyemi, an ambitious cardinal from Nigeria played by Lucian Msamati, who insists he deserves the opportunity to be pope. But Lawrence finds that he too has blemishes on his record.

Watching Conclave made me realize why conclaves can last years. It is an endless search for perfection among fallible human beings, none of whom began their lives as adults or priests.  The process reinforces the ever-present somber reality that infallibility is both elusive and an illusion, that we must recognize we are works in progress and strive to be better. The film suggests, however, that strict adherence to the rules of the church is required and that there’s no margin for error when it comes to the papacy.

This lack of flexibility could help explain why people seem to feel alienated from religion and religious institutions. While they are not one and the same, they both manifest in the lack of church-going. It makes you wonder, then, if the church itself is lacking in a relatability factor, where its leaders present themselves as pure and infallible and the congregation by contrast is made to feel like heathens.

An interesting aspect of Conclave is the difficulty in locating the villain in the story. Coincidentally, COTC recently recorded a podcast on the different forms that a villain can take. In it, we also pose a question regarding audiences’ patience to watch films where the villain is not readily obvious. On the one hand, Cardinals Tremblay and Wozniak can be considered the villains for their dishonesty and bigotry, respectively. But perhaps the villain is less obvious. 

In his background checks and confrontations with cardinals, Cardinal Lawrence is determined to honor the late pope’s trust in him. But his efforts can also be viewed as a desperate fight to keep evil out of their sacred space. In this sense, he is not fighting the cardinals themselves; rather he is fighting the lust for power, which has the potential to corrupt the church throughout if that kind of power wins. From this perspective, power is the villain rather than the individuals themselves. Cardinals Tremblay and Wozniak behave poorly because they have been infected by a thirst for power that can ultimately fracture the church if they ascend to the role of pontiff. Given what is at stake, Lawrence’s wariness and diligence are warranted and admirable. At the same time though, it suggests he is in pursuit of an infallible human being, or perhaps just the appearance of one.

I love movies that give you a glimpse of places and processes we would not otherwise see or experience. The value of Conclave is that it helps us appreciate Catholic clergy, or clergy in general, as flawed people, much like everyone else. What distorts this view, I believe, are the religious institution’s frequent adorning of accoutrements like crosses, starched robes, hats, and even certain colors (i.e. the notion of white for purity) to mask their imperfections and present themselves as holy, unbiased, without ambition, and always upright. We lowly parishioners can’t possibly measure up. Perhaps this is just naïvete on my part, but I wonder how clergy might modify their presentation to make themselves more relatable to the people they serve. Maybe this could be the beginning of making church feel like a second home again.