Conclave

My feeling after watching “Conclave” is that it is not truly anti-Catholic. After all, it shows the cardinals genuinely, in the end, electing the candidate they believe to be the holiest among them. Despite the temptations to simony and lust and ambition, they are on the whole sincere—a realistic, even an optimistic, appraisal. And there is an interesting question in the end. Spoiler alert. Stop reading now if you have not seen the film. 

Given that Cardinal Benitez’s medical condition is just barely possible, what are the moral issues it involves? What should Benitez or Lawrence, in good conscience, do or have do?

For what it is worth, I think the conclusion the movie offers is correct. At this point, it is an irrelevant technicality. 

My sense is more that the screenwriters have been lazy. They show a shocking lack of knowledge of the Catholic faith, and have not taken the trouble to get it right. Having spent so much, and such care, on the cinematography, it is shameful that they did not put in the effort to get the theology right. Even had the intent been to criticize the Catholic church, they have been mostly punching at straw men. I feel as though my intelligence, as audience, has been insulted.

It is not a legitimate criticism of Catholic, or any, traditionalism, for example, to associate it with racism, as they do by having Cardinal Tedesco worry about one of “those people” (sub-Saharan Africans) becoming pope. Even outside the Church, there is no reason to associate traditionalism with racism. But certainly not inside the church, where the most traditionalist cardinals are usually found in Africa and Asia. If the screenwriters want to object to traditionalism, they have to offer some genuine reason it is bad.

Part of the problem is that, in typical Hollywood fashion, they have to portray one character as an absolute villain. They even use the tired and obvious trope of introducing Tedesco by immediately showing him being rude to an underling. Sophomoric.

Far better to give each character depth and motive. But they did not bother.

More cringeworthy is Cardinal Lawrence’s extempore soliloquy: 

“St Paul said that God’s gift to the Church is its variety. It is this variety, this diversity of people and views that gives our Church its strength. In the course of a long life in the service of our Mother the Church, let me tell you that there is one sin I have come to fear above all others. Certainty. Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. Even Christ was not certain at the end

‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ He cried out in His agony at the ninth hour on the cross. Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt. If there was only certainty, and if there was no doubt, there would be no mystery, and therefore no need for faith. Let us pray that God will grant us a Pope who doubts. Let Him grant us a Pope who sins and asks for forgiveness. And carries on.”

There’s just about everything wrong with that.

To begin with, St. Paul never said God’s gift to the church was variety or diversity. That’s some weird projection. My guess is that the intended justification for this claim is that St. Paul said there was neither Jew nor Greek in Christ. This is not a celebration of diversity, but a call to unity. In the Bible, the diversity of mankind is the result of sin—see the Tower of Babel. 

And necessarily no Church is about a diversity of views. People come together as a church because of shared views. If you are a Christian, you profess the Nicene Creed, and must commit to it at each mass. If you are a Catholic, you accept the Catechism of the Catholic Church, all 2865 paragraphs of it.

You are free to have diverse views on other topics; but that is not what religion is about.

Lawrence actually says certainty is a sin. Not just a sin, but the worst sin. 

If certainty is a sin, then the apostles and the prophets and all the martyrs were particularly sinful men. As are monks and nuns. They surrendered everything, even their lives, for their certainty. 

Moreover, certainty is not the enemy of tolerance—uncertainty is. This is not just an innocent error, but highly dangerous. If you are certain of the truth, you are untroubled by someone else denying it. Nobody gets agitated at hearing someone else say that the sun orbits the earth, or that the moon is made of cheese. We laugh; we condescend. 

Only if we are uncertain of truth, if we are plagued by our own doubts, do we need to plug our ears, or shout down or eliminate other views. 

You see this, for example, in the current plague of Muslim terrorism. Someone I read recently pointed out that, until rather recently, Muslims were relatively sanguine about the West and accepting Western political norms. The Middle East was mostly quiet, and cooperative, even with imperial powers like Britain and France trudging through and setting up their colonial administrations. After the formation of Israel, the PLO rose in opposition: but as a Marxist, not a Muslim, organization. There was no Muslim opposition to Israel then. The Middle East in general was secularizing, under nationalist leaders with no religious agenda: Nasser in Egypt; Assad; Saddam; all secular nationalists. In Iran, the monarchy was similarly secular.

Something happened. Something changed.

The Muslim terrorists who have risen to prominence since are almost always Western-educated.

What has changed is the internet. The Muslim world had been largely hived off. Remarkably few Western writings were ever translated into Arabic. With greater exposure to Western thought, Muslims are now commonly doubting their religion. And so they are less tolerant. They cannot any longer trust Allah to manage his own affairs.

“Let [God] grant us a pope who sins and asks for forgiveness” is also incoherent. It suggests sin itself is a good. Theologically it is incoherent, since we all sin. And incoherent since we all, as Catholics, ask for forgiveness.

And the movie, and Cardinal Lawrence, then contradict these words, when Lawrence insists that Cardinal Adeyemi can never be pope because of a sin he committed, and repents, years ago. This is heresy. Moses was a murderer. David was a murderer. The Good Thief went straight to heaven. St. Paul persecuted Christians. Redemption is what the Church is for. 

Cardinal Bellini, the “progressive,” objects to Adeyemi as pope because he “would send homosexuals to hell.” No Catholic cardinal would say that; nobody has the power to send someone to hell. Not even God himself does this. We choose hell. And this suggests that cardinals get to individually decide on faith or morals. Not even the pope can do that; not even an ecumenical council can. Should the Church be wrong in believing homosexual sex to be sinful, this error could not send any homosexual to hell; any more than not believing in gravity means you can fly.

After the bombing, which is more than a bit over the top, a cheap thrill, the screenplay has Cardinal Tedesco orate, “We need a leader who fights these animals.” No Catholic prelate is going to refer in public, among fellow cardinals, to another human being as an “animal.” That would mean rejecting basic Church teaching, not to mention Aristotle. 

And it would be so easy for the screenwriter to simply omit this word. Had Tedesco said “terrorist” instead, we would have had an interesting moral and philosophical issue to consider. Should we fight if attacked, or turn the other cheek? When is it right to fight back?

Perhaps the screenwriter inserted this word precisely to avoid an interesting moral question he did not want. But that is malpractice as a writer.

And Cardinal Benitez responds with his own howler, supposed by the screenplay to be deeply persuasive, the last word: “The church is not tradition. It is what we do next.”

Tradition is exactly what the church is: the “deposit of faith.” “Holy, catholic, and apostolic. That third term means it must not deviate from tradition. On matters of faith and morals, anything it says must be demonstrated to be in full accord with what the apostles said two thousand years ago. Unmoor from this, and the Catholic Church has no reason to exist. It is just a social club. 

It is not, in the end, an evil movie. It is a bad movie.