Conclave Ending Explained | Certainty, Doubt, Unity

Bishop Robert Barron had quite the response to Conclave. He said: If you are interested in a film about the Catholic Church that could have been written by the editorial board of the New York Times, this is your movie. The hierarchy of the Church is a hotbed of ambition, corruption, and desperate egotism; Conservatives are xenophobic extremists, and the liberals are self-important schemers. None can escape this irredeemable situation. The only way forward is the embrace of the progressive buzz words of diversity, inclusion, indifference to doctrine, and the ultimate solution is a virtue signaling Cardinal who takes the Papal name of Innocent and who is a biological female. Since it checks practically every woke box, I’m sure it will win a boatload of awards, but my advice is to run away from it as fast as you can.”

I wrote the whole quote because it’s so dramatic, politically charged, and calibrated for a particular audience that the Bishop actually feels like he’s a character from Conclave. Barron is a prolific personality. He appears as a correspondent on every major news network, has 3 million followers on Facebook, 1.7 million subscribers on YouTube, and founded a media empire, Word on Fire, where he is the leading figure. Podcasts, books, videos, Bibles, merch—you name it, Bishop Barron’s monetized it.  

While Conclave takes many dramatic liberties, the core of its story is the tension between the ideals of Catholicism and the weaknesses of the men who would lead the Church. 

I found a 2013 article on NBC News titled “‘Amateur hour’: Vatican conclave drama is one for the history books, experts say”.

A lame-duck pope. A secret dossier. Rumors of a gay cabal. A cardinal accused of “inappropriate” behavior. The Vatican is in an uproar, and Church scholars say there hasn’t been this much drama surrounding a conclave since 1800, when Pope Pius VI died while being held prisoner by Napoleon. One Vatican watcher says you have to go back to 1730—when Pope Benedict XIII’s right-hand man fled Rome in disguise amid allegations of corruption—to find a conclave buffeted by this much scandal. “This is not a healthy situation for any kind of institution,” said the Rev. Thomas Reese, an expert on the Catholic Church at Georgetown University. “It looks like amateur hour.” 

While actual conclaves might be less scandalous than what we see in the film (or read in articles that precede them), the Church itself has and has had controversy aplenty. And that’s ultimately what the film tries to represent. The exaggerated drama becomes a microcosm for a much larger conversation about the men who govern this institution. 

In Conclave, we see the instability caused by the pursuit of the papacy. These men who have dedicated themselves to live by moral ideals descend into less than moral behavior. 

For Adeyemi, it’s the revelation of his illicit relations with a nun 30 years prior. Even though the event was in the past, it’s ongoing in the sense that Adeyemi has never and will never take responsibility for parentage. He protected his position in the Church rather than doing right by the child. 

For Tremblay, he paid cardinals to vote for him. And also maneuvered to have Sister Shanumi present to wreck Adeyemi’s chances. It’s a mix of politics, capitalism, and sabotage completely unbecoming of someone who would lead an organization that preaches morals. 

Bellini tanked his own candidacy because he had agreed to one of Tremblay’s bribes. But then he acted holier than thou when it came to Tedesco. Meanwhile, Tedesco is completely intolerant, to the point of justifying hate and fascism within the Church.

All this bubbles to the surface because of the loss of stability created by the Pope’s death. Without its moral figurehead, the ugly underbelly starts to show. The weaknesses of these men begin to overwhelm the ideals they preach to their congregations. It’s this lack of unity, this tension, that Lawrence comments on in his speech. 

Let me speak from the heart for a moment. Saint Paul said be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ. To work together, to grow together, we must be tolerant. No one person or faction seeking to dominate another. And speaking to the Ephesians who were, of course, a mixture of Jews and gentiles, Paul reminds us 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. And over the course of many years in the service of our mother, the Church, there is one sin which 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 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 asks for forgiveness and carries on. 

Note the calls for unity. For togetherness. For mixing. For variety, diversity. And calling the church “mother”. 

The climax of the movie is the speech-off between Tedesco and Benitez. Tedesco ends his tyrannical rant with the statement, “We need a leader who fights these animals.” At that point, Father Benitez rises: 

My brother cardinal, with respect, what do you know about war? I carried out my ministry in the Congo, in Baghdad and Kabul, I’ve seen the lines of the dead and wounded, Christian and Muslim. When you say we have to fight, what is it you think we’re fighting? Do you think it’s those deluded men who carried out these terrible acts today? No, my brother. The thing you’re fighting is here, here, inside each and every one of us if we give in to hate now, if we speak of sides, instead of speaking for every man and woman. 

This is my first time here, amongst you, and I suppose it will be my last. Forgive me, but these last few days we have shown ourselves to be small, petty men. We have seemed concerned only with ourselves, with Rome, with these elections, with power. But these things are not the Church. The Church is not tradition. The Church is not the past. The Church is what we do next. 

Speech is central to the film. Many of these men who have dedicated their lives to an ideal were quick to give up that ideal to pursue power. You may have noticed over the course of the movie that most of the cardinals completely ignore the sisters who serve them during the conclave. Benitez, though, while giving his blessing before a meal, takes the time to thank the sisters. Then, in the above speech, makes mention of not just “every man” but “every man and woman”. 

The irony here is that Pope Francis inspired Richard Harris, author of the novel the movie’s based on. From an interview Harris did with the Catholic Herald: “I think Pope Francis is brilliant. He is an argument for the process of the conclave. He embodies in himself the contradictions and the difficulties—and that is one of the things I like about the Catholic Church, that it carries its contradictions and its fights within itself. When he makes his homilies and speeches, I really believe with him that doubt is central to faith…”

The author of that article concludes: “Conclave is more than an intelligent thriller: it reveals the dilemmas we all face, caught as we are between aspiration and reality, between the sacred and the profane. Its author clearly has engaged with the Church, and his work represents, from the Church’s point of view, a heartening product of this nexus between faith and art.” [Note: earlier in the article, the author explains the Vatican actually supported Harris’s research for the novel]. 

Why the praise for the book but the rejection of the film? Internal monologue. In the novel, you get the interiority of the Lawrence character that allows for a humanizing. People can connect with the character’s humanity because they’re privy to the character’s thoughts and feelings. It creates empathy. But film has no interiority. Its very nature is external. There’s an inherent distance between characters and audience that is only bridged through dialogue and scenes where emotion is worn on the sleeve. The stoicism of Conclave the movie never allowed for that humanity to come in. 

In 2022, Pope Francis gave a speech in Saint Peter’s Square. I’m going to include the entire speech.

The Gospel of this third Sunday of Advent speaks to us about John the Baptist who, while in prison, sends his disciples to ask Jesus: “Are you he who is to come, or shall we look for another?” (Mt 11:4). Indeed, John, hearing of Jesus’ works, is seized with doubt as to whether He is really the Messiah or not. In fact, he imagined a stern Messiah who would come and do justice with power by chastising sinners. Now, on the contrary, Jesus has words and gestures of compassion towards all; at the centre of His action is the mercy that forgives, whereby “the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them” (v. 6). It does us good, however, to look more closely at this crisis of John the Baptist, as it can tell us something important too.

The text emphasizes that John is in prison, and this, as well as being a physical place, makes us think of the inner situation he is experiencing: in prison there is darkness, there is no possibility of seeing clearly and seeing beyond it. In effect, the Baptist is no longer able to recognize Jesus as the awaited Messiah. He is assailed by doubt, and he sends the disciples to check: “Go and see if he is the Messiah or not”. It surprises us that this should happen to John, the one who had baptized Jesus in the Jordan and had indicated him to his disciples as the Lamb of God (cf. Jn 1:29). But this means that even the greatest believer goes through the tunnel of doubt. And this is not a bad thing; on the contrary, sometimes it is essential for spiritual growth: it helps us understand that God is always greater than we imagine Him to be. His works are surprising compared to our calculations; His actions are different, always, they exceed our needs and expectations; and therefore, we must never stop seeking Him and converting to His true face. A great theologian used to say that God “needs to be rediscovered in stages… sometimes believing that we are losing Him” (H. DE LUBAC, Sur les chemins de Dieu). This is what the Baptist does: in doubt, he still seeks Him, questions Him, “argues” with Him and finally rediscovers Him. John, defined by Jesus as the greatest among those born of women (cf. Mt 11:11), teaches us, in short, not to close God within our own mindsets. This is always the danger, the temptation: to make ourselves a God to our measure, a God to use. And God is something else.

Brothers and sisters, we too at times find ourselves in his situation, in an inner jail, unable to recognize the newness of the Lord, whom we perhaps hold captive in the presumption that we already know everything about Him. Dear brothers and sisters, one never knows everything about God, never! Perhaps we have in mind a powerful God who does what He wants, instead of the God of humble meekness, the God of mercy and love, who always intervenes respecting our freedom and our choices. Perhaps we even find ourselves saying to Him: “Are you really you, so humble, the God who is coming to save us?”. And something similar can happen to us with our brothers and sisters too: we have our ideas, our prejudices and we attach rigid labels to others, especially those we feel are different to us. Advent, then is a time for overturning our perspectives, for letting ourselves be surprised by God’s mercy. Astonishment: God always astonishes. We saw, not long ago, in the television programme “A Sua Immagine”, they were talking about wonder. God is always the One who stirs wonder in you. A time – Advent – in which, preparing the Nativity display for the Infant Jesus, we learn again who our Lord is; a time to leave behind certain preconceptions and prejudices about God and our brothers and sisters. Advent is a time in which, instead of thinking about gifts for ourselves, we can give words and gestures of consolation to those who are wounded, as Jesus did with the blind, the deaf and the lame.

May Our Lady take us by the hand, like a mother, may she take us by the hand in these days of preparation for Christmas, and help us recognize in the smallness of the Infant the greatness of God who is coming.

To me, that embodies everything we see in Conclave. Especially the bit about “Advent is a time in which, instead of thinking about gifts for ourselves, we can give words and gestures of consolation to those who are wounded, as Jesus did with the blind, the deaf and the lame.” The cardinals in the film become obsessed with gifts for themselves. Something that feels punished, especially when Lawrence votes for himself and the ceiling immediately detonates. While Benitez is the one who preaches giving words and gestures to others.