Conclave is, at its heart, a letter of love and hope addressed to the Church.
This doesn’t mean that it is uncritical of the Church, or its leadership.
The film takes as its subject the Roman Catholic Church – specifically, a meeting of the College of Cardinals to elect a new Pope. The cardinals gather in conclave: a private meeting. They are supposed to be isolated, walled off from the world so that they might prayerfully discern and then cast their ballots.
One would have to be very naive indeed to be surprised that the Church has its politics. In the Anglican Church, at least in my experience, politics is everywhere: in every parish, every deanery, every diocese. At the surface level the film makes theological divisions the centre of its political conflict, setting liberal against moderate against conservative, and then members of these three camps against each other, with some vying to be their tendancy’s preferred candidate.
Yet, I would suggest, the deeper meaning of the film is found in its title. The cardinals are supposed to be walled off from the mess of the world, even perhaps from the mess of each other. And yet, this fails: the world breaks in, the mess breaks in. We are drawn to see that there is no Church aside from the mess. Ambitions of a particular kind of piety, of conclave, of discernment apart, however well intentioned, are ultimately in vain, and indeed misguided.
Throughout the film I found myself thinking of the pastoral approach of Saint Paul. The worshipping communities that he founded weren’t perfect: they were messy, complex… human. Paul himself was very human, prone to anger and to ego, while gifted a particular inspired clarity and insight – we see all this if we read his letters in their entirety and take them seriously. The conflict to which Paul responds is sometimes intensely practical, sometimes moral, sometimes theological… but at its foundation, it is always human. The parallel with the conflict at the conclave is exact.
The reactions of my fellow audience members were fascinating. They laughed at the film’s occasional Father Ted-esque moments of humour, such as a cardinal having a Nespresso machine in his room, or the antics of another trying to work a photocopier. And yet they also laughed when Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), the film’s flawed hero, earnestly prayed for God’s guidance. I found that hard: I don’t say that they were wrong to laugh, but I cannot myself be that cynical.
More encouragingly, the audience cheered with joy when those whose power and voices are muted by the structures of the Church spoke up prophetically for justice. As one we roared in triumph as Sister Agnes (Isabella Rossellini) delivered her devastating nod of the head.
I started this review by describing Conclave as a love letter to the Church. It could just as easily be understood as a love letter to humanity.
In the past few months I’ve found myself fixed upon 1 Corinthians 13. It’s a magnificent theological reflection on what it is to be human and to be in community with other humans – and the parallel between Paul’s rhetoric and that of the film is uncanny.
“If I speak in the tongues of humans and of angels but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.” (1 Cor 13.1)
From the conclave’s first moments we see conflict: a cacophany of clanging cardinals. As the film progresses, the discord increases to a crescendo… until, with a bang, it suddenly turns to something else.
The disingenuous attempts of the cardinals to push away the world, embracing politics in the Vatican’s stairwells but never admitting it in the open, finally and totally fail. When they stop trying to hide away the mess of humanity, unmasking the corrupting realities of power and opening them to scrutiny, transformation begins.
This is not a transformation without pain or difficulty – and yet, tenuously, the conclave arrives at the summit of Paul’s paean on humanity: And now faith, hope, and love remain, these three, and the greatest of these is love. (1 Cor 13.13)
The film ends with a mirthful, laughing trinity of women walking out together to celebrate the election of the new Pope – a figure of the Divine just as lovely as the deceased Pope’s wandering turtle. I left the cinema carrying that same mirth, hopeful, encouraged as a follower of Jesus and yet deeply challenged.
The Church must by its very nature be a reforming institution, until finally the Kingdom is built. As a text – dare I say it, an epistle – Conclave certainly plays a worthy part in that process. As this film encourages us, may we let go of certainty and instead open ourselves to the mess of life with hearts always ready to love, just as Jesus did.