Reviews of two recent movies and musings on the upcoming papal conclave.
“We are not on earth as museum keepers, but to cultivate a flourishing garden of life and to prepare a glorious future. The Pope is dead. Long live the Pope!”
– Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli (Pope John XXIII)
Introduction
Hidden in plain sight among the Renaissance wonders of the Vatican Museum is a painting by Sicilian artist Tommaso Laureti. His name goes unmentioned among the contemporaries whose works are found throughout the neighboring hallways — Reni, Michelangelo, Raphael — yet his efforts deserve similar praise. The fresco depicts a single golden crucifix, surrounded on all sides by the colorful marble walls of a temple, towering over the shattered remains of a Roman statue, seemingly depicting the messenger god Mercury. Just behind the pedestaled crucifix extends a long colonnade, just behind which stands the faint outline of another temple, perhaps a converted cathedral.
“The Triumph of Christianity over Paganism,” it’s called. The victory of self-denial over ruthless self-interest. The servant conquering the emperor. The living triumphing over the dead. To see it properly, you must crane your neck and allow the scene to soar over you — another subject of its conquest. It begs a humbling perspective. Are we really better than our pagan forebears? To whom are we closer, Mercury or Messiah?
Coincidentally, the first pope to take a new regnal name upon his election was 6th century prelate John II, who felt his given pagan name Mercurius — for Mercury — would dishonor the seat of Peter. This rejection of Roman paganism would set the tone for his pontificate, which saw the struggle escalate with popular heresies. He guided the Church through some of its earliest struggles, and his personal decision to take a papal name began a tradition that has persisted for over a millennia and a half.
Now, fifteen hundred years later, we are on the cusp of another pontificate. With the death of Pope Francis on Easter Monday, the Catholic Church has entered its period of “sede vacante.”
The two-and-a-half weeks between his death and the beginning of the papal conclave gave me and the rest of the world time to catch up on the history and procedures of the Catholic ritual, as well as read up on predictions for the next Roman pontiff. For many, this involved watching Hollywood’s two most recent attempts at portraying the event: 2019’s The Two Popes and 2024’s Conclave. As expected, what the films have in production value, talent, and entertainment, they lack in theological depth and political truth. Yet, though artistically inferior to the Renaissance beauty they depict, the films beg similar questions of politics, piety, and the persistence of paganism in the modern world.
The Truth of Beauty?
For millennia, the arts have been vessels through which Christian truths have been communicated to the faithful. Some of the earliest surviving Christian artifacts, besides the epistles and gospels, are works of art. During the Middle Ages, grand cathedrals and intricate stained glass communicated to unschooled Christians what the written word could not. For some Christian traditions, iconography is a cornerstone of daily faith and weekly worship. Even the Renaissance — which, through the birth of the modern world, would usher in the movements and ideas that would later prove deadly to widespread Christian belief in the West — was stoked with religious ambition. Many of the great works of the Renaissance, some of which are discussed above, adapted new techniques to the portrayal of holy scenes.
Sadly, the means of cultural production are no longer in faithful hands. Christian alternatives often seek to glorify or proselytize, but they often lack the financial or artistic means to accomplish these goals with any sense of excellence, and they often accomplish little more than a hackneyed emulation of their secular counterparts. Modern Hollywood, while producing works of great scale and aesthetic ambition, fails to aspire to any sense of spiritual transcendence. When it makes an attempt at religious storytelling, the result invariably devolves into secular Hollywood homiletics.
Case in point, the movies above. Conclave, based on a 2016 novel of the same name, follows a titular papal conclave following the death of an unnamed pope, led by British Cardinal Thomas Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), who serves as the Dean of the College of Cardinals. From the start, the story devolves into a painfully presentist “liberal” versus “conservative” dichotomy, following the two factions as they position their respective candidates. The British and American “liberals” are pitted against the African and Italian “conservatives,” the former wanting to reform the Church’s approach to moral issues and bring its stances more in line with the modern world, and the latter wanting to restore liturgical tradition (especially with the Latin Mass) and confront the aggression of other faiths, particularly radical Islam.
Along the way, Cardinal Lawrence investigates a number of controversies surrounding some of the papabili, including an African cardinal’s sexual failures as a young man, the camerlengo (the Vatican chamberlain) Cardinal Joseph Tremblay’s (John Lithgow) simoniac attempt to curry favor with the cardinal electors, and the surprise inclusion of unknown Cardinal Vincent Benitez (Carlos Diehz) in the conclave. The latter had been appointed in pectore (secretly) by the recently deceased pope, seemingly out of need to protect Benitez’s work in his dangerous archdiocese of Kabul, Afghanistan.
Though the jockeying between tradition and “progress” is the film’s main story, it is Benitez’s election that becomes its twist. After taking the regnal name “Innocent” and going to the Stanza de Lacrime (Room of Tears) to don his papal vestments, Benitez is confronted by Lawrence, who had been investigating a mysterious trip the new pope had planned to take years prior for a “medical treatment.” At this moment, Benitez reveals the truth: he is intersex, born with ovaries and female chromosomes, yet taking the outward physical appearance of a man. Technically, this would disqualify him from holding the papacy, but his election has already been confirmed. As he dons his white papal vestments, Lawrence ruminates in his shock, though eventually accepting the outcome with a smile.
It is an ending almost as laughable as it is disappointing. An entire movie’s worth of tension was released, snapped like an over-stretched rubber band, by a lazy embrace of current issues. The Catholic Church, the oldest institution in the world, is subjugated to painfully contemporary confusions of identity. The film’s creators wallow in false sanctimony and faux depth, invoking a sermon Cardinal Lawrence himself gave at the beginning of the conclave in which he denounced “certainty” as “one sin I have come to fear above all others,” a “sin” which is “the great enemy of unity” and “the deadly enemy of tolerance.” Benitez’s intersex identity embodies the uncertainty praised by Cardinal Lawrence. The movie is almost reaching out its elbow and nudging the viewer: get it, get it?
Of course, doubt — especially of the big questions of life, faith, and meaning — is undoubtedly true as an epistemological reality. Everyone, even the most devout believer, has his doubts. The gospels are replete with stories of people who, despite having even witnessed Christ’s miracles, continue to doubt the divinity of the Nazarene. One of the apostles, Thomas, has been made the human metonym for doubt — his nickname, after all, is “Doubting Thomas,” as he failed to believe the resurrection until the risen Christ presented his wounded wrists for inspection.
Yet, faith is finding some sense of certainty in a sea of doubt, and the Catholic Church — whose annals are no strangers to doubts and disputations — has marked itself as a bulwark of doctrinal clarity in the tempests of the modern world. Healthy doubt should certainly be discussed, even encouraged, among the faithful, but it should not become a defining feature of religious life. To do so would completely subvert the moral and metaphysical purposes of Christian belief.
This notion of “doubt” has become a favorite attack line of modern creatives and commentators against Christians. The problem with these folks who cling to “guns” and “religion,” as Barack Obama once said, is that they’re too certain about what they believe, and those beliefs happen to be wrong, and we’re the ones who know what’s true. Christopher Hitchens wrote that “[t]he person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.” In 2008, a movie literally called Doubt — starring Meryl Streep, Viola Davis, and Philip Seymour Hoffman in an adaptation of the 2005 Pulitzer-prize-winning play — explored the story of sexual abuse in a fictional school, though its ending reveled in obscure non-resolution. Remember the title? Get it, get it? Aren’t we clever?
In 2016, the Oscar for Best Picture went to Spotlight, a film — and typical exercise in journalistic congratulation — about the investigation into sexual abuse within the Catholic Church. Though well-reviewed and thematically important — even earning a screening at the Vatican itself — the movie wasn’t released in a vacuum. Films and shows about Christians rarely paint them in a positive light. The more scandal, the better. Implicit in Hollywood’s thematic focus on Christian moral failings is not, as they would claim, an honest look at institutional failings — institutions fail all the time, most of which are not religious in nature. It is, of course, the idea that Christianity is constantly at odds with itself, that true believers are nothing but a bunch of power-hungry hypocrites.
Though they implore Christians to “doubt,” modern progressives — especially in Hollywood — never do it themselves. Their outlook is certain, and their moral critiques are unassailable. By destabilizing Christian belief, they hope to substitute their own moral system. If the past decades have proven anything, it’s that their methods have been wildly successful.
Yet, where their critiques aren’t squarely leveled against historic Christian teachings — against divorce, abortion, sexual ethics, to name a few — they merit some legitimate consideration. After all, the tension between heaven and earth has been at the heart of Christian history, especially since St. Augustine defended Christianity against Roman paganism in the 5th-century magnum opus City of God. If there’s one thing as certain as the boundlessness of God’s love and mercy, it is the inevitability of human sin. Often, this sin has infected the very institutions trusted with guiding the faithful, and it has tragically pushed many away from the God who dearly loves them.
A version of the tension, the inner struggle between earthly ambition and heavenly glory, implicates the potential for sin in such sacred environments. This idea is an undercurrent in Conclave, but it is depicted so obtusely that it is lost entirely. After the doors are locked, phones disconnected, and windows barred, the cardinals begin roaming about the resplendent hallways plotting the election of the next pope. Yet, the immediate tension is less between the cardinals and their colleagues. It is primarily between themselves and their own consciences. Cardinal Lawrence begs his fellow electors not to choose him, pleading his inability to bear the burden of the papacy. Lawrence’s closest friend and confidant, American Cardinal Aldo Bellini (Stanley Tucci), confesses later in the film that he was too rash in seeking the office so heavily.
With these moments, the movie had the opportunity to move the source of conflict inward, from the college of electors to the souls of the cardinals. Perhaps Cardinal Lawrence, after all of his politicking, investigating, and soul-searching, could have emerged with the white cassock, shouldering a burden for which he was not ready. Or, perhaps the traditional Cardinal Goffredo Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto) would be elected, and Lawrence would be confronted with the “failure” of his efforts to sway his colleague’s opinion. Such an ending would reflect the futility of modern politics against Christian tradition, inverting the typical one-way ratchet of influence between culture and faith. Yet, the film opted for neither option. Instead, it settled for laziness, a disappointing ending to an otherwise intriguing, although superficial, movie.
All that remains of the film is the beauty of its backgrounds — including the Royal Palace of Caserta (the Vatican stand-in) and a full-scale reconstruction of the Sistine Chapel — the inventiveness of its cinematography, and the ephemeral intrigue of its contrived plot. It stands as a cautionary tale of superficial beauty. Though aesthetic grandeur may hint toward eternal truth, it can never replace such truth. In some cases, by charming the eyes, the beautiful can lead the soul astray.
Between Benedict and Bergoglio
Though Conclave follows a completely fictional papal succession, the 2019 biopic The Two Popes follows the real-life figures behind the upcoming election. The film depicts the relationship between Pope Benedict XVI (Anthony Hopkins) and Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio (Jonathan Pryce) in the lead-up to the former’s historic resignation and the latter’s ascension to the papacy. It’s a touching, though fictionalized, depiction of the relationship between two men of different outlooks on the world and the church. At moments, it feels almost like a papal buddy film, following the pair on the road to history.
Yet, because it must necessarily adhere to the rules of storytelling and perspective, Bergoglio becomes the protagonist, and Benedict XVI the aging, oppositional figure. The cardinal’s charisma and pastoral charm are contrasted with the pope’s physical frailty and conservative disposition. When Bergoglio jokes, Benedict musters a skeptical smirk. Where the cardinal offers good-faith criticisms of the Church — especially against its handling of sexual abuse scandals — the pope instinctively cautions against change. When the Argentine arrives in simple clothing and seeks the simplest forms of travel, he is ferried about in private cars and the papal helicopter, taken from one example of Roman splendor to the next. Though the contrasts make for an interesting movie, they create interpersonal, and ideological, conflict where there likely wasn’t.
The film’s climax occurs beneath the resplendent frescoes of the Sistine Chapel, where Benedict and Bergoglio walk alone in tense conversation. The pope reveals to the cardinal that he is planning to do something unseen since the 15th century: resign. Bergoglio, like the rest of the world, who would soon hear the same news, is stunned. “The last time anyone discussed a thing like this,” the cardinal responds, “these frescoes weren’t painted. Two Popes? Unthinkable.” Bergoglio fears that the move will be interpreted by outside observers as a capitulation to worldly pressure, a tacit admission of wrongdoing amid the many scandals gripping the Church. “If you resign,” Bergoglio cautions Benedict, “you will damage the prestige of the papacy forever.”
At this point in the film, the forces of historical gravity and contemporary politics are nearly suffocating. The temporal is converging on the eternal.
Unexpectedly, the film escapes the pressures of the present moment by returning to the past, continuing an earlier flashback recounting Bergolgio’s young adulthood and early clerical career. At this point in the flashback, the future pope is entering his 40s, and Argentina has descended into the “Dirty War.” The year is 1976, and Argentina’s president, Isabel Perón, has been removed in a coup d’état and replaced with a military junta. New leadership begins targeting religious organizations throughout Argentina, including the country’s Jesuits, of whom Bergoglio is the Provincial Superior. Bergoglio rushes to defend his order, removing alleged “subversive” books from the seminary’s library and meeting with military officials to spare his fellow priests. In one of the most tense sequences of the flashback, Bergoglio suspends two priests from the order for not obeying his commands to shut down a mission they have started in Rivadavia. Later, they are arrested, imprisoned, and tortured under accusations of involvement with anti-junta rebels.
Bergoglio’s failure to protect his priests continues to haunt him, even as he talks with Pope Benedict in the Sistine Chapel. In trying to protect the rest of his order from bodily harm, he abandoned part of his flock. Did he selfishly abandon the path to martyrdom in order to serve his fleshly interests? Or, did he do what is right, taking it upon himself to protect the greatest number of those entrusted to his care, even if it meant making difficult sacrifices to do so?
Again, the tension between earthly desire and divine will comes to the fore. Above him soars the beautiful frescoes he had just mentioned. God reaches out to Adam, but the first man pulls his finger away from his creator. Beneath the scene, the City of Man battles the City of God, with even its earthly ambassadors struggling to discern what is rightly demanded of them. All that truly awaits is the subject of Michelangelo’s other famed Sistine painting, hanging just beyond the titular two popes: the Last Judgment. At last, the soul is brought before the throne, forced to give account of all it did, and didn’t do, on earth.
Bergoglio would soon return to the Sistine Chapel as a cardinal elector and, after the voting was over, Pope Francis. Though given stewardship over the Catholic Church, his soul would still remain in the hands of God. With his recent death, the justness of his earthly deeds is only known to his Creator.
Popes, Politics, and Paganism
As these reflections show, the papacy has always been political. The earliest Christians were intimately familiar with the pressures of worldly power, and they spent their earthly ministry facing the threat of persecution and death. Almost all of Christ’s apostles were martyred by the Roman Empire, except for John’s death of old age. Peter, who Catholics claim as the first pope, was crucified in the Circus of Nero on the exact spot his basilica now stands. The Vatican itself, like Laureti’s painting, represents Christianity’s triumph over the empire that crucified its savior.
Christ himself established the radical break between earthly power and heavenly glory. When challenged by Pharisees to answer whether it be lawful for Jews to pay taxes to Caesar Augustus, Jesus answers, “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s” (Matthew 22:21). Hoping to trap Jesus in political subversion, the Pharisees are instead embarrassed by his appeal to a higher jurisdiction. Later, when Christ is brought before Pilate, he is again asked his political intentions. “Art thou the King of the Jews?” the Roman governor asks Christ. Christ answers: “My kingdom is not of this world; if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews, but now is my kingdom not from hence” (John 18:36). Christ establishes his kingship, but in a plane far beyond earthly comprehension.
In his Confessions, St. Augustine — his own name taken from the honorific given to Roman emperors — remarks upon the crucifixion: “But the Only Begotten hath been “made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification” and hath been numbered among us and paid tribute to Caesar.” Christ’s exposition upon the Roman denarius is literalized. Though giving his body in sacrifice to Caesar, Christ gives his soul unto God. Through the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection, the two kingdoms are radically conjoined, though the City of God ultimately triumphs over its human counterpart.
The early church expanded under the threat of the same empire, though it eventually captured the hearts of its citizens and became its official faith. It then set its course through history, clarifying teaching, expanding across continents, and outlasting empires. During the Middle Ages, the Church launched military campaigns to counteract Islamic influence. In these times, popes were agents of geopolitical change, not just religious figures.
In the early modern era, the Papal States exerted profound influence over regional and global affairs, and their papal leaders waded into the muck of earthly politics. Machiavelli famously took Pope Alexander VI as a model of earthly cunning. “Alexander VI never did anything, nor ever thought of anything,” the Florentine wrote, “but how to deceive men, and he always found a subject to whom he could do it,” adding that the pontiff’s “deceits succeeded at his will.” To Machiavelli, Alexander “more than any other pope in history showed what could be done with finance and force of arms.”
Despite his machinations, Alexander VI left nothing of a legacy, save his portrayal in The Prince. Two successors later — following the twenty-six-day pontificate of Pius III — Julius II would leave an indelible mark on Western civilization and set the stage for centuries of pontifical drama. Through military intervention and diplomacy, he restored the Papal States to their former power, establishing a greater buffer between the Church’s jurisdiction and the surrounding kingdoms. However, most importantly, he commissioned the rebuilding of St. Peter’s Basilica, the decorating of the Raphael Rooms, and the painting of the Sistine Chapel. The beauty that today stands as a testament to human ingenuity and divine inspiration was the product of Julius II’s religious statesmanship.
Though nothing in this world is eternal, great works of art and architecture get the closest to timelessness. Through lasting beauty, they model for human generations the endurance of divine truth. It is beneath these works that cardinals elect the next pope and continue the temporal shepherding of an eternal church.
The position they meet to fill is the oldest continuous political and religious office in the West. It has survived usurpations, kidnappings, and global war. Throughout its history, it has needed to balance the kingdoms between which it sits. Today is no exception.
As with modern films, the beauty of the Sistine Chapel should be a cautionary tale. Though beauty can be an attribute of truth, it cannot be reducible to it. The realms of human and heavenly endeavor, though united through Christ, are nonetheless separate spheres. It is during events like papal conclaves that this truth is most important.
The two movies ultimately present a question that has become central to modern Western life. Which God do we worship? Do we bow before the minor deities of status, fame, wealth, ideology, and power? Or, do we worship the true Almighty? Do we find transcendence in the self or in the sacred?
The upcoming conclave will inevitably be dragged into our own domestic political battles. We’ll be tempted to follow the cardinals as we did the film’s characters, rooting for one side or the other, hoping that a certain cardinal will prevail in the time-honored ritual, and we will map our own current political divides onto a two-thousand-year-old institution. Such temptations must be avoided.
Yet, we must also not lose the importance of these moments to the political, cultural, and civilizational vitality of our civilization. Though I am a Protestant, I recognize the papacy’s crucial importance in representing Christianity throughout the world, guarding against the excesses that modern life has produced. The tasks facing us seem almost Herculean, to borrow from the pagan traditions preceding Christianity.
Though conquered by Christianity in the first century, paganism continues to rear its ugly head. The neo-paganisms gripping the West — gender ideology and abortion radicalism on the left; transhumanist tech culture and Nietzschean vitalism on the right — will take all of the strength we can muster. Such a strength will not be found in our weakened political institutions; it will be found in faith. Though faith can and will revitalize our political life, the former must be guarded before the latter can be guaranteed.
The upcoming conclave will not get even close to solving the issues facing our civilization, though it may represent a step, however small, towards restoring our culture to its Christian roots. It will be up to concerned people of faith to lean into the City of God, as only its power can anchor the City of Man. Yet, we must be content with our ultimate hope in the life to come, the final escape from the necessity of human politics. On earth, we can simply find hope in Christ’s assurance to Peter about the church, that “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”
Image Credit: “Pope Pius VII in the Sistine Chapel” (1814), Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres — Wikimedia Commons
Copyright © 2025 The Princeton Tory. All rights reserved.