Conclave and the Sequestering of the Divine

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by Houston Coley

Shockingly enough, the word on everyone’s lips throughout this awards season has been a devoutly religious one: “Conclave.” I would’ve never expected a movie about the election of a new pope to be the one that grabbed the attention of both audiences and awards voters this year, but whenever the broader culture engages a movie that touches on subjects of faith, I’ll always find myself leaning in.

I knew that I would probably enjoy Conclave as soon as I heard the line in the trailer about the importance of mystery in the experience of faith. As a sincerely religious person, I’m often disappointed and appalled by the didacticism and underwhelming moralizing of so many depictions of faith in cinema. It’s so rare to find a film about spirituality that asks honest questions rather than providing formulated answers and paints religious characters who feel real and flawed and complicated just like anybody else.

So I liked the speech in the trailer. Simply agreeing with what a film is saying, however, is not the same as genuinely communing with it as a work of art. I didn’t know how much I would actually resonate with the movie until I finally saw it.

By my count, it’s been a fairly fruitful year for authentic depictions of faith being represented in film. On my birthday back in May, I got to see Ethan Hawke in-person premiering his film Wildcat about the life of Flannery O’Connor—and I felt deeply seen by the way that it embraced the offbeat Southern Gothic strangeness of Flannery’s stories and the honesty of her struggle with reconciling her identity as both an artist and a faithful Catholic. Nobody saw it, but The Book of Clarence was actually pretty provocative and sincere in its depiction of Christ through the eyes of a swindler. And even Furiosa felt like a quasi-Biblical epic about the firstfruits of a righteous kingdom.

By the same token, I wasn’t certain exactly how much Conclave would touch on subjects of faith with any degree of real contemplation; despite the compelling trailer, the film could’ve easily turned out to be a typical Agatha Christie whodunit with an incidental backdrop of The Vatican.

Many of the reviews I’ve read have painted the movie as a sort of “Real Housewives of The Papacy” melodrama caper about priests gossiping behind closed doors. Without a doubt, the film has its share of subtle tongue-in-cheek humor—a sardonic curtsy and an evil vape pen steal the show. Even so, I’m increasingly convinced that the reason people are playing up this camp/comedy interpretation is because they don’t quite know how to engage with the film’s actual setting and subject matter in a sincere way.

Excitingly, the setting and subject are not incidental. Conclave is not a by-the-numbers murder mystery with faith sprinkled in to spice things up, nor is it just a campy “priests gossiping” melodrama or an entirely politically motivated allegory for the 2024 election; it is a movie whose text is quite deliberately interested in exploring the relationship between God’s will, man’s agency, and the church’s institutional identity.

From the opening minutes, it is clear that the film has no interest in obsessing over the mere existence or nonexistence of God. Other movies have explored this well, but this one takes the piety of its protagonist as a given part of the world. Near the start, Stanley Tucci’s Cardinal Bellini says the late Holy Father never had any doubts about God. Instead, Bellini remarks, “what he had lost faith in was the Church.” This is what Conclave is truly about.

Conclave asks prescient questions about the purpose of the Church in the world—and about how its identity has shifted over 2,000 years. Robert Harris, the author of the original novel, said in an interview: “My preparation began by reading the Gospels, which are revolutionary. And the contrast between that and this great edifice of ritual and pomp and power and wealth of the Church is striking.” Harris’s narrative takes seriously the reality of the supernatural but interrogates how humans often close ourselves off to that reality in the institutions we construct.

One of the central conceits of this story is the idea of “sequestering.” In a captivating montage near the start of the film, cardinals arrive from all over the world with the singular intention of shutting themselves away from the outside. The windows are covered with mechanical (almost militaristic) shutters, devices that might communicate with outsiders are confiscated, large swathes of police stand guard outside, and everyone speaks in hushed voices for fear of others listening in. I was not raised Catholic, but growing up in the Bible Belt, this divide between the “outside” and the “inside”—or “secular” and “sacred”—felt palpably familiar. It’s part of a broader notion that true spirituality is primarily found in the absence of “the world,” which is known to be sinful and corrupt.

But as Conclave shows us, even within these sacred and sequestered walls, sin and corruption persist. Perhaps they are even more present when the egos of men are forced into close quarters, and the neighbors they are meant to love become an abstract point of rhetorical debate.

Indeed, witnessing the sheer sterility of the Casa Santa Marta and the people locked inside, it may seem like God is absent from the space within these walls. All natural light—the first good thing God ever created—has been locked out. The colors green and blue—those two colors that God so favored when he crafted the earth among the heavens—are nowhere to be found. Even birds are locked in cages, chirping away aimlessly without attention given. Like the birds, music has been confined as well—to the Sunday Mass only. The church has attempted to create a box where it can encounter God and reach an important decision without the influence of anything outside its walls, but in doing so, it has effectively shut out God himself.

It’s always perplexing to me that anyone would think God should be encountered without engaging the people and the beauty of the world he created. The Bible itself is a book that is far from sterile or sequestered, rich with the five senses of earthy human experience. Bread and wine, birds and fish, farmers and shepherds, weddings and births, blood and water, trees and flowers—all play key roles in the metaphors Christ uses to describe the kingdom of God. If anything, the ministry of Jesus is a picture of a scruffy prophet taking the word of God from within the walls of a religious institution out into the mountains, seashores, and countryside for the poor and unclean.

The writer Wendell Berry said, “I don't think it is enough appreciated how much an outdoor book the Bible is . . . a book open to the sky. Passages that within walls seem improbable or incredible, outdoors seem merely natural.” If I was attempting to discern the will of God, I think it would involve deliberately engaging with the world he spoke into being: taking long silent hikes with my friends, observing the lilies and sparrows, making music and art, reading both scripture and literature, speaking with strangers young and old, and journeying to a decision not shielded from the world but shaped by it. This kind of embodied meditation is not completely foreign even to the Catholic Church; many have found it on the Camino De Santiago, the ancient pilgrimage stretching across Europe and ending in Spain.

The Bible has a rich and compelling throughline of people attempting to fit the divine into a manageable box, both physical and spiritual. The narrative is rife with men demanding systems and sacrifices, temples and tyrants, strife and scarcity—and God warning them against it every time. Despite all this, he never abandons them. He continues to work within the systems they erect, however broken and unjust, to bring about gradual justice and redemption.

In the same way, despite all the dehumanizing darkness and claustrophobia of the conclave, one thing is still clear: God is not wholly absent. Regardless of man’s distancing from God’s world and voice, he is working regardless to turn the tables, make small the mighty, and lift up the humble.

The presence of God is glimpsed in a myriad of ways throughout the film: the sincere and purehearted prayer Cardinal Benitez offers before dinner, inviting his colleagues to remember “the hungry, the thirsty, the sick, and the sisters who prepared this food for us”; the Holy Father’s pet turtles, impossible to fully domesticate or keep in their neat and tidy enclosures; Cardinal Lawrence’s impassioned homily about faith and mystery, which seems to suddenly flow from his lips in a moment of divine clarity and synthesis; the genuine apology and forgiveness between Lawrence and Bellini after their ambitions get the better of them; and of course, the eyes and ears of Sister Agnes, watchful and perceptive of every ego and injustice. Sister Agnes, it may be noted, is the only character with plants (and birds) in her personal office. When she shares the truth about Cardinal Tremblay’s betrayal, we even hear the sound of a raven cawing outside as she leaves the frame.

Of course, there’s one moment when the presence of God feels all but undeniable. It’s the moment where the ceiling itself falls in, filling the air with the two earliest elements of creation: dust and light. The aftermath of this divine intervention feels undeniably powerful; some, like Tedesco, argue for an even more militaristic defense against the “outside.” Others, like Benitez, see the moment as one to ponder the church’s relationship to the world.

When the cardinals gather to vote one last time, the windows above the room remain blown open by the blast. As they sit in a contemplative daze, something changes. The air begins to move and stir, reaching deep into their hearts. Rarely have I witnessed such a perfect cinematic distillation of the ancient understanding of the Holy Spirit as “breath” or “wind.” And not just wind, but song. The birds, free from their cages just like the nuns soon to return to the world, begin to sing again through the open windows. The cardinals cast their vote accordingly, with renewed relationship to the space beyond the walls.

In an act of providence, a kind and humble man is elected—a man who, much like the trinity itself, exists outside the easy boxes we might try to fit him inside. And then the windows and doors finally open, letting the light stream in, and sending God’s people back out into his wide world once more.

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Houston Coley is a writer, documentary filmmaker, and self-described “theme park theologian” currently living in Nashville, Tennessee. He is the artistic director of a nonprofit called Art Within.

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Photo by Chad Greiter on Unsplash