The papal conclave starts today, when cardinals get together in Vatican City to elect the next Pope following Francis’ death in April. On one hand, it’s a very niche event, involving one of the world’s many religious denominations electing its next leader. On the other hand, Catholicism is the largest Christian denomination; there are 1.4 billion Catholics in the world, so there are a lot of people invested in the outcome. Despite this number, I’ve usually thought the conclave was mainly of interest to Catholics–until this year, when it feels like everyone I know is talking about it.
I’m not naive enough to believe all my friends and internet acquaintances have suddenly joined me in my interest in religion: The hype is surely due to the popularity of the movie Conclave, a Best Picture contender that won the Oscar for best adapted screenplay. I saw it early in its New York release because I’m a religion nerd, but I was surprised by how much its wider release grabbed viewers. Then again, it’s essentially a movie about men gossiping, which has given it a fandom, as Yahoo Entertainment notes, akin to Drag Race and Mean Girls. One respondent told the outlet, “This very serious movie about Catholicism, that you would think is very straightforward, is full of messy bitches and vape hits.”
Conclave has spawned parody news accounts, fanfiction I refuse to subject myself to, and a fan zine benefitting progressive causes. Our colleague Isaiah shared with me a visual novel that widens the movie’s world. There are jokes and memes about the conclave, and a fantasy football league to guess who the next Pope might be. At a bar trivia I went to last night, teams had names like “No One Out-Pizzas The Balla,” and there was a whole round dedicated to papal names.
I’d argue that the office of the Pope already had a global fandom that rivals any pop star in the world, but here you’ve basically got tens of thousands of people stanning an ecclesiastical process, which is essentially an interest so niche even I, a scholar of niche religions, am surprised. But one of the other things I studied during my time in divinity school was how religion is portrayed in media and popular culture, and through the reaction Conclave has spawned, we see some of the effects that can have. By fictionalizing the process, by showing how a religion that can feel unchanging and inscrutable is also made up of humans and their human concerns, I think Conclave has taken Catholicism down a peg in a good way. It shows how people have the power to shape a faith, for good and bad. There’s been more talk this year of who the real-life papal contenders are than I’ve ever heard among non-Catholics, and I think some of that is down to the way that Conclave skillfully showed the stakes of the conclave in terms of how the next Pope will shape the priorities of the Church. In a time when the gulf between institutions and the rest of us feels wider and more consequential than ever, Conclave turned one of the most powerful institutions in the world into a high school lunch room, and in so doing made the Church, and all our institutions, more relatable.
That there is a somewhat radical bent to the movie’s gender politics has helped Conclave find a broader audience, but that thread has also drawn more attention to those things in the Church and religion at large. It dovetails well with the legacy of Francis, hugely progressive by Catholic standards even when he fell short of what many of us might like to see. From my experience, religion has always been a progressive force, but I know that’s not the case for everyone. Conclave’s final twist shows a glimpse of a possible future for the Church—progress not as some incremental compromise but as a total alternative to all the familiar and terrible futures the movie’s other papal candidates can offer. It shows how even something like the Catholic Church can not just be changed by people, but changed radically and instantly. These days, as more of our institutions feel unstoppably regressive, as they steamroll actual humans in their pursuit of their own ends, Conclave has let people imagine an alternative. We can make up stories about and root for our favorite real-life papal candidates, but through that, in ways big and small, we’re imagining and championing a new future, and we’re believing–even if in a small, jokey way–that this future can come to be.
In Conclave, the most conservative candidates have no more ownership over the Church than its most progressive. The movie explores the potential of this fact and puts the future of the Church in anyone’s hands. The memes and fan games can be a reminder that everyday religious people have ownership over their our faiths too, and that all of us have power within the institutions in our lives. We might not be able to influence who the next Pope is going to be (unless you are a member of the conclave illicitly reading this blog on your phone), but we can take this vision to both our religious and secular institutions closer to home.
