The Political Fantasies of Conclave

Mr. Smith Goes to Rome

The most insightful film about American politics is as old as The Wizard of Oz. Released in 1939, Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington captures Americans’ deepest, most contradictory desires about what they want in their politicians. In the film, the earnest but average Jefferson Smith is appointed to the U.S. Senate, unaware that his wholesomeness is being exploited to whitewash a corrupt pork barrel bill in Congress that will line the pockets of his fellow Tennessee Senator Joseph Paine and the state’s political bosses. His naïveté is mocked by the press and gawked at by his aide, but eventually, his radiant civic virtue overpowers the cynics who try to bring him down. His self-sacrificing filibuster on the Senate floor is so moving that Paine feels compelled to confess his sins to the public, vindicating Smith and his cause (Jefferson Smith—>J.S.—>Jesus Savior. Get it??!!). By his mere presence, the swamp drains itself.

One key feature of political fantasies like Mr. Smith (and its cinematic offspring, such as Dave), in which average people are thrust into power, is that these protagonists are never actually elected. Appointed outside normal procedures, they never have to define themselves, pick sides, make compromises, or work within the system. Chosen for office like Arthur was anointed king of the Britons, they are the unicorn figure, the oxymoron, the walking contradiction that Americans want but could never have: the a-political politician.

This type of political fantasy is the best way to understand this year’s Oscar hopeful Conclave (I’ll warn you before any spoilers), a thriller about writing names on slips of paper. Though set in the suffocating quarters of the Vatican, far away in place and purpose from Washington, it is a political horse race with a dash of Agatha-Christie-whodunnit mystery mixed in. Following the death of the current pope, the Catholic church’s 100+ cardinals gather to elect the new pope, and the film simplifies such an enormous cast of characters for us by focusing solely on the leaders of the church’s theo-political factions. These range from the liberal American Aldo Bellini, who wants to make accommodations with modernity, to the the pre-Vatican-II vaping reactionary Goffredo Tedesco, who wants to restore the church’s Latinate heritage while still looking boss. Outside of the left-right spectrum is the pragmatic moderate, Canadian Joseph Tremblay, and the initial front runner, the conservative Nigerian Joshua Adeyemi, whose early popularity signals how the demographics of the once Euro-centric church have shifted to the Global South. The voting is being managed by Dean of the Cardinals Thomas Lawrence, who is privately hoping to escape a faith crisis wrought by his time in the soul-crushing Vatican bureaucracy by retiring into a monastic order when this is all over.

Lawrence’s struggle between spiritual purity and political corruption runs throughout the film. We, along with Lawrence, is put off by the barely naked ambition of Tedesco and especially Bellini, who at first feigns principled indifference to the position before insisting that he, or at least his side, must win at all costs. Burdened by these tensions, in his opening homily of the conclave, Lawrence sets aside his prepared remarks, composed in Latin, and speaks in English from the heart. Lawrence reminds the cardinals of Paul’s teaching that “no one faction should dominate over another,” that unity in diversity is the church’s strength. The climax of the speech needs to be quoted in full because it serves as the film’s thesis statement: “There is one sin which I have come to fear above all: certainty. Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance…Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt. If there were only certainty, and 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. And let Him grant us a pope who sins, and who asks for forgiveness, and who carries on.”

Through Lawrence, the film makes its case for the ideal spiritual leader: he must reject strident dogmatism and embrace humble tolerance, unifying factional divides by modeling true faith. The speech, like Jefferson Smith, holds out hope that innate goodness can heal political fractures and bridge our divides. Lawrence’s speech, though it might convert the film’s audience, seems to have made no impact on the other cardinals. The election of the pope proceeds in ruthless fashion, as factions seek to build coalitions, and front runners like Adeyemi are brought down by scandals. Faced with these cassocked Machiavellians, Lawrence wonders if, in the end, he is the one best suited to lead the faith—only to have a spectacular (and perhaps divine?) intervention chastising him for his hubris in the very moment that he casts a vote for himself.

How can anyone be worthy of this office, we wonder? Enter from stage right Vincent Benitez, the Mexican archbishop of Kabul who was made a cardinal “in pectore” (in secret) by the now deceased pope. Nobody knows who he is; he wasn’t even on the list of cardinals expected to join the conclave. But he quickly makes his mark with a heartfelt blessing over dinner that focuses on the sick, poor, and the lonely. A seemingly minor player in the beginning, Benitez garners a growing number of votes with each round. He does not claim front-runner status, though, until he intervenes (dare I say filibusters?) an argument between Tedesco and Bellini that threatened to bring the church’s culture wars into the open. Speaking in Spanish (again, the native vernacular is reserved for speeches from the heart), Benitez chastises the cardinals for being “hombres pequenos,” for fixating on elections in Rome instead of the weightier matters. “Esas cosas no son la iglesia”—these things are not the church. “La iglesia no es la tradicion. La iglesia no es el pasado. La iglesia es lo que hagamos en adelante.” The church is not the tradition. The church is not the past. The church is whatever we do going forwards. In a movie full of surprises, it ***SPOILER ALERT, BUT IS IT NECESSARY?** shocks no one that Benitez is elected pope in the very next scene.

Many viewers have criticized the film for being “anti-Catholic,” as it portrays the election of the pope as a disgusting squabble among power-hungry old men. I think this misses the mark. The political machinations create the backdrop against which the film can earnestly advocate for the Cardinal Benitez’s of the world. The film falls short not in its depiction of the church but in its depiction of politics. Vincent Benitez’s ascension to the papacy—a man who no one even knew was a cardinal less than a week ago—is even more absurd than Jefferson Smith’s appointment to, and success in, the Senate. But his anonymity is the key to his success: unlike Tedesco, Bellini, and the rest, Benitez has never been asked what he thinks about, say, Catholic divorce laws, or same-sex marriage, or priestly celibacy. Because he has spent time in the Congo, Baghdad, and Kabul, he has dealt with “real” issues—when Tedesco claims that the church is at “war” with secularism and Islam, Benitez softly mocks him: “With respect, brother, what do you know about war?” Having no public reputation or position, he is untainted by the messy world of political striving, and is thus the only one who could possibly be worthy to hold office. When asked, after he accepts the papacy, what his papal name will be, Benitez whispers: “Innocent.”

That chosen name reveals another type of fantasy that the film flirts with: what if our leaders were not only beyond faction but beyond sin altogether? Immediately after Benitez’s election, Lawrence is told a bombshell secret about a secret “health” trip the pope-elect took several years ago. Lawrence confronts Benitez, who reveals ***MAJOR SPOILER ALERT*** that he is intersex, a fact he did not discover until late in life, and that that medical trip was to remove his female reproductive organs (which he ultimately decided against doing). While Lawrence is at a loss for words at the news, Benitez, assures him, “Perhaps it is my difference that will make me more useful. I think again of your sermon. I know what it is to exist between the world’s certainties.”

Benitez’s claim to be an answer to Lawrence’s call for a new type of pope is, for all its pathos, a misreading of Lawrence’s homily. In his message, Lawrence is calling for a pope whose spiritual experiences—or even his lack thereof—have prepared him to assume the title of pope humbly, to be mindful that heavy is the head that wears the mitre. It is a call to reject strident self-assurance and factional flag-waving by acknowledging the inevitability of sin and weakness.

But Benitez’s qualification for the papacy is presented not as a product of a crucible of faith, of hard-won wisdom earned from a wrestle with sin and doubt, but as an innate condition that he was born with—a condition that he wasn’t even aware of for most of his life. His knowledge about what it is to exist between the world’s certainties is not knowledge gained but knowledge given. To be clear, I am not suggesting that Benitez could not have an enlightening perspective to bring to church matters, or that people born into unique circumstances wouldn’t have valuable insights in leadership positions—clearly he can, and clearly they do. But that is not the type of knowledge that Lawrence—and, implicitly, the film—claims that it wants. Lawrence fears certainty, but Benitez’s claim that he exists between certainties does not suggest that he exists between certainties. On the contrary, he is quite confident in the way God made him. Rather, he represents a challenge to the other people’s fragile certainty about the world and how it works. The film seems to suggest that Benitez, simply by being intersex, is endowed with special insights denied to the average cardinal—a crude idealization of intersex people that smacks of the “magical Negro” trope. It doesn’t even explore the meaning or significance of Benitez being intersex—it simply presents it, and then ends, as if there was nothing left to say.

I don’t think the film is being as heavy-handed as saying, “God gave Benitez female body parts to inject the Catholic church’s leadership with some much needed femininity” (though by ending with a shot of two female nuns talking and laughing, I’m not sure that it’s not saying that). But I do think it wants it both ways: it wants a spiritual leader who has been tempered by a wrestle with the frailties of moral experience, but it ultimately anoits a leader who seems set apart from those frailties. Benitez’s secret ordination as a cardinal means that he is above political squabbles; his intersex condition means that he is set apart for the papacy not by his actions but by his unchosen identity.

What is all the more striking about the film landing on Benitez is that there is another candidate who more clearly fits Lawrence’s call, a cardinal who was already popular: Cardinal Adeyemi. Though he was the leader of the early ballots, the Nigerian cardinal was dismissed by the leaders of the political factions for his racial identity: Tedesco sneered at the idea of an African at the had of the church, and Bellini told his fellow liberals that, if the socially conservative Adeyemi were elevated, that at the very least he would also be the first black pope in the church’s history. But what undoes Adeyemi’s candidacy is the revelation that ***AGAIN, SPOILER ALERT*** Adeyemi fathered a child with a nun in his younger years. Lawrence confronts Adeyemi about this rumor privately in his dorm room, and we see Adeyemi insist that while he had lapsed, he is a different man now, and that he had felt the Holy Spirit preparing him for the papacy. Presumably, Adeyemi is a figure who could unite reactionaries and liberals by refusing to slot easily into their political battles. He is also a cardinal who has experienced sin and come out the other side, someone who has been humbled by both discrimination and imperfection: is this not the type of man that Lawrence was looking for?

The problem with Adeyemi is that he is, well, too human. That scene in his dorm room, when Adeyemi realizes that not only his vocation and reputation are in tatters, is the most poignant, honest scene in the whole movie. For once, the figures on screen do not exist as stand-ins for theological ideologies or character types. Adeyemi’s tears are the painful outcry of a living, breathing human wrestling with ambition, guilt, anger, and despair, a man coming to grips with the reality that, after being just inches from the summit, he and his life’s work have fallen into disgrace.

I don’t know that Adeyemi would’ve been a good pope. I am not convinced that Lawrence’s criteria for the papacy, full of hollow platitudes that flatter the ears of our secular age, is as wise as he believes. But in elevating Benitez over Adeyemi, the film pays lip-service about wanting more relatable, humble leaders while holding out for a leader who will—miraculously, improbably—transcend our expectations. It wants someone that Americans have been pining after for decades, someone who is that which experience, Catholic dogma, and common sense suggests is impossible: innocent.