Conclave revisited: what might actually make a man unfit to be pope?
Miles Pattenden• February 8, 2025
The Pope and his cardinals make surprising stars for a blockbuster. Edward Berger’s thriller Conclave, which eschews the traditional memes through which Christianity comes alive, purports to shine a light onto the Church’s dark heart. Sex, money, power and puffed-up prelates: cardinals are corrupt and self-serving. So much, so new. But this adaptation of Robert Harris’s novel lacks the subtlety to explore that subject inventively. There are exquisite moments, of course. Who could get enough of Sergio Castellitto’s oafish far-right Italian nationalist porporato? Half camp cliché, half Matteo Salvini, he looked as if he had wandered in from casting for Emily in Paris.
Ralph Fiennes’s English cardinal-dean, on the other hand, occasionally flashes the sort of steel we might have expected of him in his long-running role as James Bond’s “M”. Nevertheless, the film might have worked better had he been reimagined as a more unctuous, sanctimonious Cardinal Urquhart figure. Such a man certainly would not have chosen the papal name John. Meanwhile, Stanley Tucci’s Cardinal Bellini comes across as the sort of liberal figure whose internal contradictions doom his causes. Cardinal Adeyemi, played by Lucian Msamati, is a veritable caricature of the African Church.
Isabella Rossellini’s no-nonsense nun is the star of the show. But her fine performance suffers along with the others from the weakness of the overall material. Harris’s novel has something of a painting-by-numbers quality to it. It’s a worthy yarn, for sure, but it often feels as if the great author simply sent out some young researcher with instructions to list all the quirky but implausible plot-twists a papal election might involve.
Harris at least knows how to pace a storyline. Berger less so: his film’s action is all bunched towards the end. Yet both book and film show an unfortunate, if not unpredictable, lack of historical awareness. Real cardinals have often faced one or more of the dilemmas presented. Medieval conclaves, for instance, frequently took place in an atmosphere of violence not unlike that imagined here. Questions also arose about cardinals’ eligibility to participate, usually because the process of creating them had not been concluded when the pope died.
A memorable passage in the Master of Ceremonies’ diary in 1484 discusses one example: the case of the Milanese nobleman Ascanio Sforza. Sixtus IV had announced Sforza’s elevation to the Sacred College some months earlier, but he had not come to Rome to take part in the requisite ceremonies. Was he eligible to vote? At length, the cardinals collectively reached a somewhat bizarre conclusion. Had the ceremonies begun, he would not have been eligible because the rites would have been interrupted. But they had not, so he was fine. He took part in three more conclaves.
More notoriously, Niccolò Coscia, Benedict XIII’s right-hand man, was allowed into the 1740 conclave despite having spent the previous ten years in the Castel Sant’Angelo as Clement XII’s prisoner. No cardinal relished the prospect of having his vote taken away from him and thus all cardinals tended to support maximalist interpretations of their franchise rights. Has this changed in the 21st century?
A more fundamental problem for Conclave arises from the film’s final revelation. As those who have seen it will know, Harris’s great denouement is that the man elected as the new pope is, well, not quite a man. This must have seemed just the thing for high drama. It also, helpfully, from a liberal perspective, draws attention to a perception that the Church’s attitude towards women is outmoded and discriminatory. The film reinforces this periodically when it juxtaposes Rossellini’s single plain nun with the sea of men in red.
Yet intersex priests are nothing new to the Church. Brendan Röder, a brilliant young German scholar at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, has uncovered a whole series of cases that went before the Congregation of the Council (now the Dicastery for the Clergy) in the 17th and 18th centuries. One such concerns Clodius from Toul, whose petition in 1652 describes the doubts about his sex at his birth.
In Clodius’s case, the problem was this: he was, he claimed, born “male with all parts becoming for a man” but with a female cleft (rima foeminea). Medics had regarded him as an hermaphrodite. His parents had dressed him as a girl and made him undergo an operation to remove his male genitalia. Clodius nevertheless asked to be affirmed as a man so that he could be ordained. Another similar case from 1686 involved a Capuchin novice in Naples. Superiors raised doubts about the boy, and he was examined twice by different experts.
Both men were allowed to be ordained; so, too, were various castrati. It was different, it seems, for intersex persons who wished to become nuns. In two cases, those of an unnamed “unmarried noble woman” from 1721 and of Alessandra Bechelli from 1722, permission to enter the cloister was withheld for this reason. An hermaphrodite in a convent seemed just too scandalous.
This history is more interesting than that of Harris’s story. It draws attention to the dissonance between the Tridentine Church’s views about bodies and our own. Bodily perfection became a moral and sacramental problem at Trent. A priest missing an arm could not perform the sacraments; he imperilled their sacred mysteries.
A deformed priest, likewise, might jeopardise his congregants’ salvation if he disgusted them so much that they stopped coming to Mass. Simone Majoli, a 16th-century canonist, wrote that each priest must therefore be “irreproachable of entire body [and] perfect from head to toe”.
Today, we find such arguments grotesque. We understand we have a duty to those less fortunate than ourselves, if they need accommodations or allowances for their inclusion; such persons include the physically disabled. How the Church got from its Tridentine position to its present one is an interesting story. The Church made an important distinction between debilitas (natural weakness) and mutilatio (inflicted mutilation) – disability by category and by degree – but it was often difficult to pin down in practice.
One of the most serious debilitas in early modern canonistic texts was that of skin colour. Modern sensibilities are rightly offended when we see them describe race in terms of “blemish” and “perfection”. Thank goodness Harris’s book and Berger’s film do not go in for this angle. Yet the Church has a reckoning to undertake with itself here. A little humility about the history of its attitudes in the past might generate more compassion for those who fall short of its ideals today.
Dr Miles Pattenden is a member of the Faculty of History at the University of Oxford