Pope Francis, the Cardinals, and “Conclave”

The new movie “Conclave,” faithfully adapted from Robert Harris’s 2016 novel, tells the story of a vexed papal election by depicting the Vatican of melodramatic legend: dark corridors, footfalls, sotto-voce conversations; locked rooms, hidden documents, scheming, sabotage; clerics in deftly tailored vestments swishing across marble floors and red carpets. When an English cardinal, Thomas Lawrence, played by Ralph Fiennes, says, “I think we’ve had enough secrets,” it’s clear that the disclosure of fresh secrets is soon to come.

The Vatican’s Synod on Synodality, whose second Rome session concluded at the end of last month, was strikingly prosaic by contrast. This October, as last October, about three hundred and fifty voting delegates met for several hours six days a week, seated at round tables in the bright modern audience hall adjacent to St. Peter’s Basilica, to discuss “which processes” can help the Catholic Church “to live communion, to achieve participation, to open Herself to mission.” The delegates—about eighty per cent of them chosen by local church bodies, and twenty per cent by Francis himself—included roughly sixty cardinals (about half the number of voting members in the College of Cardinals), along with priests, nuns, bishops, and laypeople. Pope Francis himself attended most days. The discussions at each table followed a set format (brief comments by each speaker, followed by silent prayer) and were punctuated by intervals in which delegates described the work of “study groups” devoted to specific issues: the Church’s approach to poor people and to other religions, its missionary work, its digital presence. There were press briefings, but the proceedings were hardly newsworthy: for one thing, the agenda was shorn of controversial issues (such as the prospect of ordaining women); for another, delegates were asked to limit their comments about the daily sessions. Beyond a final report, approved a paragraph at a time by the voting delegates and then ratified by Francis, what was said at the synod was largely meant to stay at the synod.

It was very different not only from “Conclave” but from an actual conclave, the ritual held after a Pope’s death, in which cardinals under the age of eighty meet in the Sistine Chapel (behind doors locked con clave—with a key) and vote to determine which of them will be the next Pontiff. And the difference was the point. It can be said that Francis’s goal with the Synod on Synodality (begun at his initiative, in 2020) has been to bring to the Vatican a process that is more deliberative and inclusive than the cloistered, clericalist, ritualistic approach typified by a conclave. Critics complain that he is succeeding—that through the synod, and his pontificate as a whole, he is doing away with Catholicism’s legacy of grand pageantry and firm pronouncements in favor of town-meeting-style extemporaneity and fussiness over process.

But, after spending time in Rome in early October (and meeting with synod delegates) and then seeing the movie, I think that the synod, though outwardly lacking in drama, will be truly consequential. Here’s why: The gathering of a relatively large and diverse group of Catholic leaders at the Vatican two years in a row, and in the presence of the Pope, is strong evidence that in our time the Church seen in “Conclave” owes more to imagination than to fact. And it’s likely that the cardinals who took part in the synod will bring the relationships and the ways of proceeding they developed there to the next conclave.

Last year’s synod session drew criticism for its avoidance of so-called “hot-button issues,” and this year’s opened amid lowered expectations, and generally without the pushback of last October, when traditionalists denounced the event at a press conference and distributed a book describing it as an effort to muddle Church teachings. This year’s session began shortly after Pope Francis, and a retinue of clerics and reporters, made a twelve-day trip to Asia and Oceania —Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor, and Singapore—and a shorter one to Luxembourg and Belgium. (During the latter, the Catholic University of Louvain, which had invited the Pope to mark its six-hundredth anniversary, put out a statement opposing what it called his “deterministic and reductive” positions on women.) And, of course, the synod coincided with the final weeks of the U.S. Presidential campaign. On the return flight from Asia, Francis declared that both major candidates are “against life”: Kamala Harris for her broad support of legal abortion, Donald Trump for his harsh policies toward migrants and refugees. “One must choose between the lesser of two evils,” the Pope said. “Who is the lesser of two evils, that lady or that gentleman? I don’t know.”

Once the synod began, in addition to taking part in the round-table sessions, Francis carried out his usual papal duties. He led a Rosary service at the Basilica of St. Mary Major (his motorcade snarling traffic in parts of Rome); he held audiences with President Volodymyr Zelensky, of Ukraine, and Lloyd Austin, the U.S. Secretary of Defense, among others; he issued the fourth encyclical letter of his pontificate, which re-states his theme of “human fraternity” as the antidote to heartless market forces. And, most significantly, he named twenty-one new cardinals, who will be created in December, during a consistory at St. Peter’s.

The Vatican press office announced that development on October 6th, the Sunday after the synod began. The effect was to make clear that Francis is attending closely to the traditional Vatican power structure—the College of Cardinals—even as he encourages the distinctly different structure that is the synod. Francis has now selected about eighty per cent of the hundred and forty or so cardinals who are likely to elect his successor in the next conclave—fifty-four of them since 2022. In his choices, rather than looking to ecclesial insiders trained in Rome, he has favored emerging figures from the Global South—among them, this time, archbishops in Brazil, Côte d’Ivoire, Algeria, and Iran, all born in 1960 or later. A cardinal is eligible to vote in a conclave until he turns eighty. (More than a hundred are currently eighty or older.) This means that the younger cardinals named in recent years will be the voting members in the next conclave.

Paradoxically, it’s due to Francis’s assiduous naming of new cardinals that the synod is likely to affect, and even to shape, the next conclave. The fictional cardinals in “Conclave” know one another like fraternity brothers, and their exchanges in the guesthouse refectory and the backstairs of the Vatican are rooted in personal and theological quarrels that go back decades. The present College of Cardinals is probably not like that. Francis has convened the whole College only once in recent years. And his practice of incardinating youngish outsiders who share his flexible, pastoral approach to leadership means that there are now several dozen cardinals who may have a common outlook, but who have limited personal experience of one another and of the Vatican. (In an interview last month with the Catholic News Agency, Cardinal-elect Tarcisio Isao Kikuchi, the Archbishop of Tokyo—and a synod delegate—observed that, although he has met many cardinals and bishops through his work as the president of Caritas Internationalis, which coördinates charity efforts worldwide, “I don’t know . . . who they are.”) In the next conclave, then, the cardinals who have the strongest working relationships will probably be those who worked together at the synod. They have spent two full months discussing matters that bear on the future of the Church—including those kept off the agenda, such as the Church’s dealings with gay and trans people, which were discussed, anyway. And they’ve done so by engaging with lay experts, such as the theologians Catherine Clifford (from St. Paul University, in Canada) and Anna Rowlands (from Durham University, in England), and the philosopher Renee Köhler-Ryan (from the University of Notre Dame Australia). At Vatican II, in the nineteen-sixties, the bishops assembled in Rome were advised by periti—Latin for “experts”—among them Hans Küng (a renowned theologian) and Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI). When it comes time to elect a new Pope, surely some of the cardinals will seek the advice and counsel of the experts they came to know at the synod—say, during the nine-day mourning period preceding the conclave, called the novemdiales, after which the cardinal electors are sequestered in the Vatican and contact with the outside world is forbidden.

The conflict that drives the plot of “Conclave” involves the fact that none of the cardinals whose profiles make them papabili has a majority of votes from the others, and, indeed, none has the charisma or the earned authority that would warrant his election as Pope. In this respect, the movie speaks to the actual situation of the Vatican today. The Catholic hierarchy at present is not stocked with unmistakably gifted and charismatic leaders, perhaps in part because it still restricts its leadership to men pledged to celibacy, even when dwindling numbers of Catholic men are entering clerical life. When asked, “Who should be the next Pope?,” even well-informed observers of the Vatican say, “I don’t know.” Meanwhile, the synod has given some sixty cardinals the opportunity to demonstrate their ability to speak, listen, lead, and work together without great pressure or outside scrutiny. Come the next conclave, then, what the cardinal-electors will know about one another will be, in no small part, what they saw and heard at the Synod on Synodality. In that way, it will have shaped the future of Catholicism, which is no doubt what Pope Francis intended all along. ♦