“The Church is what we do next”
Conclave, Christian Witness, and the Hope of the Church
About the author: Rev. Micah Cronin (M.Div., Princeton Theological Seminary) is an Episcopal priest of the Diocese of New Jersey. He is the Associate Rector at St. George's By the River in Rumson, New Jersey.
This piece contains Conclave spoilers: watch it before you read any further.
I have seen the film Conclave four times since it came to theaters in October. Conclave is an adaptation of the 2016 novel of the same name by Robert Harris and follows Cardinal Thomas Lawrence, Dean of the College of Cardinals, as he guides his brother Cardinals in a papal conclave following the somewhat sudden death of the late Holy Father.1 It is the most aesthetically beautiful film I have ever seen. Practically every shot is stunning. The sound, too, of footsteps on marble, pages turning, pens scribbling on papal ballots, Cardinal Lawrence’s (played masterfully by Ray Fiennes) breathing that indicates the burdens and sorrows of a thousand lifetimes—all of it has as much texture and weight as the plot itself. And the plot, by the way, is itself wrapped in layers of questions and not a few axes to grind.
Every time I watch this film, I am absorbed by it. This last viewing was with my friend Paul, who was raised Catholic, is no longer practicing, and is very kindly curious about my faith and practice and forthcoming about his own spirituality. Between bites of door-dashed chicken biryani, I noticed again the not-so-subtle use of light to comment on the morality (or lack thereof) in the Curia, how (in the film, at least) it seems that the Vatican has an object for everything, such as a special linen cloth to cover the dead pope’s face, and what an adorable cardinal Stanley Tucci makes (he played the liberal American Cardinal Bellini). Beyond these, what came to coalesce was a few questions Conclave seemed to be asking: Do we want purity or forgiveness? Is a certain amount of corruption necessary? What is the real threat facing the Church?
While Conclave ends on a rather optimistic note, it approaches these questions honestly by appraising the depth of institutional and personal sin. Thus, the answers, if one can call them answers, are complicated. For me, Conclave brings forth a desire for the simplicity of a church that does nothing but proclaim Jesus Christ, who died and is alive for the sake of the world. Writing from my little corner of the Church in America, Church feels anything but simple. Speaking only for myself, I am exhausted by managing competing interests such as: self-preservation in the face of parish decline; defending the message of the Gospel from sociopathic politicians who deploy the Scriptures for their own fascistic goals; the pitfall of wealth; basic human selfishness. With longing, I imagine leading Christians who sought only Christ. Imagine if Christians gave themselves solely to this singular task. The world is quite eager for Christians like that. What does this desire reveal about my own next steps as a priest and a Christian?
Ironically, given his verbose inclinations, Karl Barth is driven by a similar longing for simplicity in Christian life. Speaking about the Church as such at the Amsterdam Assembly in 1948, Barth exhorts us to understand the Church as nothing else but the “living congregation of the living Lord Jesus Christ.”2 Anything else beyond this bare simplicity will just devolve into meaninglessness. All of our teaching, worship, and activity inside and outside the walls of our meeting place are centered on the event of our encounter with Jesus: really, all that we do is our gratitude, spoken and acted out together, for God’s condemning grace and gracious judgment from which we are brought into life.
Conclave’s vision of the church provides a vivid contrast. Here, we are shown a church that proclaims all graces and ideals but cannot live up to either. The hero of the conclave, Cardinal Lawrence, states in his homily in the opening Eucharist that he hopes God will grant the Church “a Pope who sins and asks for forgiveness and who carries on.” And yet, understandably, he cannot allow that hope to be realized for Cardinal Adeyemi, who we find out has broken his vow of celibacy in an affair with a much younger woman, which resulted in a child. The Church, Lawrence explains to a weeping Adeyemi, cannot bear yet more sexual immorality. And this is only the film's first scandal to come to light.
A conclave ostensibly guided by the Holy Spirit must be constantly clawed away from corrupt Cardinals. While Lawrence appears to manage the conclave valiantly, he is perhaps as corrupt as those individuals he seeks to protect the Church from, having broken the seal of confession, the seal upon the conclave, and the literal seal on the late Holy Father’s bedroom (read: breaking and entering). Following these actions, Lawrence’s vote for himself in the last ballot is met with an explosion caused by a terrorist attack, but perhaps in some way also a Divine rejection of his suitability for the papacy.
Any Christian who is honest about their congregation and denomination can admit that the rot portrayed by Conclave hits close to home. It is not just the Roman Catholic Church that gravely sins. This begs the question: Is it our sin then that is the threat to the church? Will our moral purity save us?
In his address on the church, Barth notes that, on the one hand, the fundamental reality is that Jesus is alive, sitting on the right hand of God, and if this is the case, then the church cannot possibly be overtaken by any threat. And yet, in the realm of time and history, the church also has a human experience, which is always threatened by death. There is always the possibility that Christians will sin, that we will tear ourselves apart, that we will lose our gaze upon Jesus to such a point that our baptism and Holy Communion will become empty signs.3 Or worse, that the sacraments become signs not of God’s grace but of the failures of human freedom and our rejection of God’s grace,4 as in Conclave’s Curia. Barth’s answer to this existential threat is, of course, renewal through Jesus’ choice to encounter us, which becomes the singular event around which a congregation gathers together and serves its neighbors.5 Put more sharply, nothing inside the church—no good will, no ideals, no piety6—will save the church from itself. We cannot renew ourselves. Only Jesus, our only hope, can. But to ask a threatened congregation to throw its hope on this is a tall order. We need God’s help even to hope.
Conclave’s answer to the sin that threatens the Roman Catholic Church is a morally pure Pope who exposes the hypocrisy and misogyny of the old traditions. When the Cardinals are huddled in an auditorium following the terrorist attack, Cardinal Benitez scolds them for their racism, bloodlust, hypocrisy, and pettiness. This was compelling to his brother cardinals, as he spoke from his perspective as a cleric who served the poorest and most oppressed of the world in secrecy. Once it is deemed safe for voting to continue, Cardinal Benitez is overwhelmingly elected to be the next Pope, and he names himself Innocent XIV. And then, in a somewhat inelegant exchange between Lawrence and the new Pope, it is suddenly revealed that the Pope is (secretly) intersex. This is, of course, kept hidden from the other Cardinals and the Catholic faithful—after all, such a condition could be disqualifying.
While this is supposed to be a bombshell reveal, I am not particularly moved by it. As an out trans man and Episcopal priest, I am not sure that a secretly intersex Pope would accomplish as much change as, say, if the Roman Catholic Church ceased demanding the kind of purity that it does from LGBTQ+ people—that same purity which some of its priests and bishops grievously flaunted in their sexual abuse of children and subsequent coverups.
However, I am moved by a short line from then-Cardinal Benitez’s scolding of his brother Cardinals. “[The Church] is what we do next,.” I am compelled by the idea of doing what is next because, in my understanding of the faith, what is next is always God and God’s will, here and now, made possible by Jesus’ resurrection and into which the Holy Spirit draws us. To put it succinctly, what God does next must precipitate what we do next. So rather than retreating into the fantasy of a Church comprised entirely of people who seek Christ, I think first I need to pray that Jesus “accept and make use”7 of my witness to his work in my life. I need to ask the risen Christ to once again encounter me, to once again encounter my parish, to once again encounter all of us who claim his Name, come what may.
Robert Harris, Conclave (Knopf Doubleday), 2016.
Karl Barth, “The Church: The Living Congregation of the Living Lord Jesus Christ” in God Here and Now, (Routledge, 2003), 75.
Barth, God Here and Now, 83–92.
Barth, God Here and Now, 88.
Barth, God Here and Now, 92.
Barth, God Here and Now, 93.
Barth, God Here and Now, 93.
I am grateful to Fr Micah Cronin, for calling to our attention "Conclave," which along with "Maestro" and "Oppenheimer" is a motion picture that deals frankly with the dilemmas that face both Christians and Jews in struggling ethically with a complex and admittedly fallen world, one in which human flourishing, even survival, can no longer be taken for granted. I would like to offer just a few further observations beyond those pertinently provided by Fr. Cronin. (1) In my view, the theme of "Conclave" is stated in the opening homily by Cardinal Lawrence, Dean of the Conclave. The enemy of the Christian faith is not so much unbelief, but rather certitude. In an age of fanaticism, credulity, and lying this is worth pondering. (2) Cardinal Lawrence is having a crisis of faith, which he freely admits, and which in his words has to do with his inability to pray. (We may recall here reports that Mother Theresa found it very difficult to pray in the latter years of her own ministry. She apparently keenly felt the absence of God.) So, it is very significant that the one time we see prayer outside the gathering of the Conclave itself, it is private prayer rather than liturgical prayer, and it is when Cardinal Lawrence, who admits he does no longer no "how to pray" is asked to pray for and by the African Cardinal, a member of Curia, and a potential Pope, who due to a lapse of judgment some 30 years earlier, engaged in a dalliance that resulted in the birth of a child. We do not hear the prayer, we only see two men sitting together, one with tears streaming down his face knowing he will never be pope, but together holding hands with heads bowed. (3) The screenwriter, of course, is brilliant. We encounter a conclave completely sealed off with the latest technology to forestall electronic eavesdropping, outside communications of any sort which might influence the papal vote, and even electronic window shadows sealing of air and light and noise of the world outside. The terrorist bomb blast in a nearby square, blows out the windows. It does not so much disrupt the elections bishop Lawrence as pope, as it opens the conclave for the first time to a real world in turmoil, in suffering, and in violence outside its deliberations. This sets the stage for Cardinal Benitez's, Archbishop of Kabul, impromptu homily challenging the ingrown, self-preoccupied, self-seeking he has witnessed in the Conclave of the College of Cardinals. As the vote proceeds after the blast, the broken windows opened to the world enable a fresh, strong breeze, to flow into the Conclave, a cinematic sign of the Holy Spirit. Do, it is Cardinal Benetiz, the gentle soul and Mexican national, who has labored in war-torn Africa and in Afghanistan, who is elected Pope. He takes the name, "Innocent," which becomes understandable as the Conclave concludes revealing that he is a male in appearance, a surgical procedure to remove his appendix discovers that he also has ovaries and a womb. He elects not to remove those female parts of his body, but to continue in life and in ministry as "God made me." (4) Finally, the actor who played the "enemy" of liberal types, the Archbishop of Venice, is wonderful as a foil to the Conclave's "liberal' caucus. He longs for the Latin language and Mass and the unity that it once gave to the Roman Catholic Church, with the emphasis on Roman. He also thinks it is time again for an Italian to be Pope. Of course, it serves his own ambitions, but he does have a point. As Protestants have never denied, and always insisted, the Pope is after all at least the Bishop of Rome. So, as the Cardinal asks, "Why not?" The great thing about religious conservatives is that they know and do not apologize for sounding "dogmatic." Liberals rarely think of themselves as "dogmatic," since, after all we are "enlightened." Both are quite certain and need to hear Cardinal Lawrence's homily. I am most grateful to Fr. Cronin. Most sincerely, James Kay