Originally published at crisis magazine
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.
Orthodox. Faithful. Free.
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