“Pope Joan” Smear Returns with a Vengeance: Conclave’s Hermaphroditic Pope

Since it is a recent Hollywood film, I expected it to be anti-Catholic bollocks, but even I didn't expect the "Pope Joan" lie to be resurrected. 

From Crisis

By Msgr Richard C. Antall

The contrived “shocker” ending of "Conclave" hearkens back to the legend of Pope Joan, which has always been a favorite of the disaffected and rabidly anti-Catholic Protestants.

I went to see the movie Conclave because someone who came to my Sunday Mass said that she was wondering how much was “real” about it. She had been to the Sistine Chapel and loved the fact that some of the movie’s scenes were presented in a nice mock-up of the place. She said her husband took some time to remember that they had been there on a recent trip to the Vatican.

How real was the movie? I had only read about some reviews that said that it made the conclave a merely political event and that it was a wishful liberal fiction about a post-Pope Francis conclave that pitted retrograde conservative ecclesiastics against “progressives.” All I could say to the woman who asked my opinion was that I hadn’t seen it but that it supposedly reduced the discernment of the new pope to a political operation.

Then I went to see the “picture” as my parents’ generation used to call cinema. I should have known that it would not only be liberal versus conservative because of the clues provided by the first scenes of the movie.

The pope dies, and the cardinal camerlengo is immediately suspicious. Two cardinals who were very close to the deceased Holy Father are in shock. Their conversation immediately turns to the coming conclave, and one cardinal is afraid that a reactionary will be elected who will take the papacy, and therefore the whole Church, “backwards.”

There is a clue that things will turn out differently because the worried liberal, who thinks himself a candidate, is toying with a chess set in the pope’s apartments. He wants to keep it as a souvenir of his friendship with the late pope because the two of them played chess frequently at the end of the day. For relaxation, said the cardinal, but he always lost because the Holy Father was always eight or nine steps ahead of any other player.

“One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it,” said Chekov. In the novel written by Robert Harris and in the movie version, the loaded rifle is the dead pope who is always moves ahead of everyone else. In this case, it seems that the liberal pope is the architect of the election of a hermaphrodite as his successor. Just what the Church needed.

The first move of the deceased pontiff is that he has a surprise for the cardinals: there is a cardinal in pectore, and he unexpectedly shows up at the last minute to the conclave. Although such cardinals are not supposed to vote in a conclave, he has a letter saying that he has been named. In the movie, he is Mexican and, in the book, Filipino, which should be a relief to anyone with ancestral connections to the Philippines. 

The dean of the college of cardinals presents him to his confreres, and the looks on the faces of the various candidates for pope are another ironic sign. They look him askance, as the old phrase says, and I began to think that he might be chosen as pope. He had worked as a priest in the Congo and Baghdad and was the archbishop of Kabul—secretly, because, presumably, the Muslim fanatics would not want him there in Afghanistan.

The plot thickens or boils or whatever you would say for this cliché-ridden exercise in thrillerdom. The dean of cardinals, whom we know has doubts about his faith, gives a reflection to his colleagues in which he says that the deceased pope would assuredly want them to elect a man who “doubted” because that was a sign of faith. The world needed a pope who had difficulty believing. The dean’s liberal friend had already confessed to him that the dead man had lost faith—not in God, but in the Church. 

The liberal coterie of cardinals, who are panicked that an African homophobe or the retrograde Cardinal Tedesco (here’s a wink for you, the word means German) will be elected. The liberals tell the one who is the most liberal of them, apparently, that he is their candidate, but they hope that he will tone down his remarks about gay marriage and other litmus test issues, especially about the Latin Rite, which he hates. He refuses to pretend that he is far from the sensus fidelium about most issues and you feel that he is only missing a halo.

The African is in trouble, however, because the French-Canadian cardinal has managed to have a Nigerian nun—with whom the prelate had a baby—come to serve at the conclave. The nun visits her one-time lover at his room and they have a shouting match, overheard by the long-suffering dean of cardinals (Ralph Fiennes) whose face shows, in several slow-motion shots, the anguish of his grief for his dead friend, his anxiety for the Church, and his doubts about himself. Maybe he has eaten something that disagrees with him, too, because his face is a mask of brooding pain.

It turns out the Canadian cardinal has engineered that this particular nun come to work at the conclave, and it all spills out after the father of her child and she exchange words at lunchtime in the cafeteria and both leave hurriedly after she drops a tray. The dean of cardinals hears her confession and gets the mother superior (Isabella Rossellini, in a role as a moody nun that does not have you thinking of her mother in The Bells of St. Mary’s) to reveal the machinations of the man who arranged the coincidence in Rome of the African prelate and his long-ago mistress. The lunchroom ruckus causes consternation.

The African cardinal loses his votes because of the strange contretemps with the sister-waitress. Then, the angst-ridden dean breaks into the papal apartment and discovers that the pope has secreted behind a panel behind his deathbed some files about the French-Canadian bribing some of the cardinals to vote for him. The liberal pope had been spying on all the cardinals and knew their bank statements and squirrelled away the information behind the oak panels. Where else would he store them, I suppose. And he had told no one except his alcoholic archbishop-secretary that he knew of the bribery (simony) and had dismissed the cardinal camerlengo just before he breathed his last.

This comes out in the wash, and then there are bombings by Islamic terrorists in Rome. When the cardinals—whose robes show the dust of the damage of the bombs to the Sistine Chapel—meet in an auditorium, Tedesco, the bogeyman threatening a Church where Latin would still be used, starts ranting about how the Church is responsible for the state of the world and that we are in a holy war with Islam. If you could see the mug on the conservative cardinal’s face, you would only wish that he would have a moustache to twirl like the villains in the old melodramas (not subtle, but it’s a movie). He is answered by the angelic cardinal in pectore, who is all sweetness and light (but remember we don’t know about his hormones yet). The speech about the love of God convinces the cardinals to elect the ringer as pope.

Then the dean, who has a lot of extracurricular activity considering the conclave is sequestered, finds out that the previous pope had paid for the newly-elected cardinal to fly to Switzerland to a special clinic that dealt with sex change operations. The new pope, who takes the name Innocentius (Get it?), is vesting to go out on the balcony of St. Peter’s to greet the excited throngs in the plaza when he is confronted by the dean.

He never went to the clinic, which was supposed to remove his womb because God had made him intersex and the Holy Father knew that, even though he had hoped the man would have a laparoscopic surgery to get rid of his uterus and ovaries. He was raised as a boy and never discovered his intersexness until he had an appendicitis attack after he was ordained. Of course, he had thought of resigning from the priesthood; but the deceased pope had reassured him. His peculiar status was a gift because of the breath of compassion it gave him. 

The dean goes out to a courtyard of the Vatican and meditates. We hear, in the background, the cheers of the people in St. Peter’s Square. End of the movie; and Rotten Tomatoes gives the work a 92 percent popular approval rating, 85 percent by reviewers. 

The contrived “shocker” ending hearkens back to the legend of Pope Joan, which has always been a favorite of the disaffected and rabidly anti-Catholic Protestants. A quasi-woman pope is the revenge of the liberal pontiff who suffered terribly from his Curia, according to the storyline. Leaving the cinema with a priest friend, we met an ex-religious he knew. “Thought-provoking,” was the reaction of the woman, although, to her credit, she didn’t seem so excited about it. She was certainly half-right if you take just the gerundive (“provoking”) part of her description.

The person who asked me if Conclave was realistic lives a distance from my parish and does not come regularly. If she comes back, I will tell her that it very realistically portrays “liberal Catholic” fantasy: a pope who has lost faith in the Church and who spies and keeps secrets about his agenda; cardinals whose plan is imposing their view of things on the faithful in contra of tradition; dubious ecclesiastical tactics to win contests with ideological or theological opponents; and, of course, saccharine cliches about the goodness (innocence) of the “liberal” imagination and caricature of the evil conspirators who like the traditional Latin Mass. What could be more realistic than that?

Bishop Barron has told Catholics to stay away from the movie. But some people may like disrespectful nonsense served up in technicolor, with long pauses so that the slow-to pick-up catch hints about how liberals really know better than anyone what God wants, even when it contradicts His word, and that tradition is a dirty word. I’m sure the second group will enjoy the thing.