While Pope Francis battles pneumonia in a Rome hospital, a curious juxtaposition has emerged: the Academy Awards buzz across the film Conclave.
The Vatican traditionally avoids discussing papal succession while the present pontiff is ailing, yet the film’s success has thrust the intricacies of a conclave into the highlight.
Conclave depicts the election of a recent pope, exploring the rituals and challenges facing the fashionable Catholic Church. The film has garnered critical acclaim, even receiving positive reviews from Vatican publications corresponding to L’Osservatore Romano and Avvenire.
This presents a novel challenge for the Catholic hierarchy, balancing prayers for Pope Francis’s recovery with the film’s exploration of a sensitive topic.
Granted, those reviews were published before Francis entered the hospital on 14 February with a posh lung infection that has taken him out of commission for the longest time of his 12-year papacy.
It’s unclear if the newspapers would have published them after Francis’ health took such a dire turn. That’s much more the case because it’s clear from the opening scenes within the Vatican’s modern Santa Marta hotel where Francis lives that Conclave’s fictional dead pope is modelled after the real-life current one.
But on the very least, the life-imitating-art coincidence of Conclave the movie finding mass popular appeal at a time when the world’s media has descended on Rome to watch Francis’ health has definitely piqued interest in what might occur in a real-life conclave.
Author Harris knows it is a sensitive time
Conclave director Edward Berger’s adaptation of the Robert Harris novel starring Ralph Fiennes because the dean of the College of Cardinals, has been nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture. It goes into Sunday’s Oscars with a Bafta win for best picture and a SAG award for best ensemble.
Harris is well aware of the sensitivity of the moment, and the way the surreal turn of events of an ailing pope dovetailing with an Oscar campaign had made his book and the film relevant to say the least. But he’s adamant against trying to exploit the moment for publicity.
“I’ve been refusing all requests to speak about it and a future conclave because I believe that’s in extreme bad taste,” Harris said. “I actually hope he’s got some more years yet.”
Francis suffered a setback on Friday, after he inhaled vomit during a coughing fit and required non-invasive mechanical ventilation to breathe. Doctors said they need 24 to 48 hours to guage how and if the isolated episode affected his overall clinical condition, while keeping his prognosis guarded.
All of which has made Conclave the film a bit too close for comfort in additional ways than one for anyone following Francis’ plight and anxious about what it means for the Catholic Church.
Mild spoiler alert
To recap: The film opens with the death of the pope and turns across the political manoeuvring and manipulations behind the election of his successor. Cardinal Thomas Lawrence (Fiennes) is dean of the College of Cardinals, who must organise the conclave amid his own crisis of religion.
With the long run of the church weighing on him, he has to contend with secrets, scandals, smear campaigns and surprising twists, while ensuring the election’s integrity.
Massimo Faggioli, theologian at Villanova University, said the film was “sadly effective” in illustrating the institutional instability that the Catholic Church goes through now, in addition to the benefit with which a single act or allegation of misconduct can spoil someone.
“The principal threats (are) now coming not from the surface (Napoleon, or Hitler, or secularisation), but from the within (especially the fear of one other sexual scandal),” he said.
For sure Berger takes some creative liberties. Cardinal Lawrence, for instance, would have been excommunicated two or possibly thrice for his efforts to navigate the intrigue, given the ban on communications with the surface world during a conclave and canon laws governing the seal of the confessional and the sealing of the papal apartments after a pope has died.
But that is Hollywood, and His Eminence will be forgiven.
Catholic media loved the film
Avvenire, which hews to the Vatican establishment line, praised the film for its sumptuous beauty, twists of plot and “anything but trivial” commentary concerning the current state of the church.
“Let’s face it: Conclave, which takes us to the guts of one in all the world’s most mysterious and secret events, is a highly entertaining film, especially for an American audience that isn’t terribly picky,” Avvenire said on 20 December, when the film opened in Italian theatres and well before Francis got sick.
Writing within the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano on 1 February, critic Alessandra Comazzi highlighted the short but critical turn played by Isabella Rossellini, as Sister Agnes.
As a longtime critic for the La Stampa day by day, Comazzi is well aware of the Vatican taboo of openly talking of a conclave. But in an interview, she said the film managed to treat a conclave as thriller without causing offence. She said the Vatican newspaper was only too pleased to publish her rave.
“The dean Lawrence has to manipulate the conclave and liberate it from these false prophets,” she said. “And I believe also from the ecclesial and non secular perspective, the director managed to do it in a really respectful way.”
But a cardinal near Francis didn’t
That said, someone who has actually participated in a conclave gave the film something of a thumbs down.
“My experience of being in at the least one conclave was not that it was some kind of scene of political backroom plotting of easy methods to get your candidate elected,” Cardinal Sean O’Malley, the retired archbishop of Boston, wrote in a 7 February blog post.
O’Malley voted within the 2013 conclave that elected Francis pope and is one in all his closest allies. He said he and his brother cardinals were well aware that tens of millions of Catholics were praying from afar “in order that the Holy Spirit would guide us in our deliberations.”
“And, in fact, in the intervening time when each cardinal votes, you are taking your ballot, stand in front of Michelangelo’s image of Christ within the ‘Last Judgment’ and swear before God that you will vote for the person who you suspect is God’s will for the church,” he wrote.
“It’s a much different experience than what they depicted within the movie,” he wrote. “For all its artistic and entertainment value, I don’t think the movie is portrayal of the spiritual reality of what a conclave is.”
