A real-life Vatican thriller

“His list was very precise: the Domus Sanctae Marthae (where cardinals stay during a papal election), the offices of some of the most senior Curia including the dean of the College of Cardinals and the secretary of state, along with Saint Peter’s Basilica, the Sistine Chapel and the Vatican gardens, of course,” says Calabrò, author of The Throne and the Altar: War in the Vatican, which was published in Italy last year.

“I remember being very surprised by the subject of his research – the Conclave. Francis had been pope for less than two years, although at the time there were rumours swirling worldwide that he was ill and likely to die soon…perhaps there is some truth in the old Italian saying that if you talk about someone’s death, it lengthens their life.”

Nearly a decade has passed and Harris’s thriller, unsurprisingly titled Conclave, has been turned into a film, released globally just as Pope Francis celebrated his 88th birthday. Ralph Fiennes’s performance as the thoughtful, progressive dean of the College of Cardinals enmeshed in a murky web of curial politics and patronage, bribery and sexual intrigue, has made him favourite to win the best actor Bafta. He is nominated at the Oscars, too, and the film has secured eight and 12 nominations at the Hollywood and British awards respectively. 

Harris insists that despite any “superficial similarities”, the late Holy Father depicted in his tale should not be read as “a portrait of the current pope”. And yet a series of events have unfolded behind the Leonine Walls in the past few months that are just as intriguing and telling as those depicted in Harris’s fiction, offering a glimpse into the priorities and values of the next leader of the Catholic Church’s 1.4 billion faithful.

Rewind two years, and some of the college’s most senior cardinals were gathered in St Peter’s Basilica in Rome to say farewell to one of their own, the outspoken conservative Australian cardinal, George Pell.

On January 11, just 24 hours after Pell’s sudden death at the age of 81 following routine surgery, John Allen Jr, editor of the Catholic online magazine Crux, had revealed that mortality was on the cardinal’s mind in one of their last conversations. But not his own mortality. Pell told Allen, to whom he had been close since his time as archbishop of Sydney and through his years as Pope Francis’s financial tsar, that he believed Pope Francis was very ill and “we’ll have a conclave before Christmas”.

It was no secret in Rome that Pell was one of several senior cardinals, among them the American Raymond Burke and the German Gerhard Müller, dissatisfied with Francis and what they felt was a growing and urgent need to look forward and think seriously about the election of his successor, perhaps a pope more in the mould of John Paul II or Benedict XVI. 

It was therefore not a complete surprise – even if the robust language left many speechless – that the day after Pell’s death it was also revealed that a blistering memorandum chastising Francis’s papacy and originally circulated anonymously among cardinals under the pseudonym “Demos” had in fact been his work. 

The document contained a savage critique of the current pontificate, describing it as a “disaster and catastrophe” and the Vatican’s financial situation as “grave”. Pell wrote that a “lack of respect for the law in the Holy See risked international scandal” and that due process must proceed to deal with the disgraced cardinal Angelo Becciu, accused (and now sentenced) for financial crimes. (In his autobiography, Hope, published globally two weeks ago, Pope Francis described the Sloane Avenue property scandal that sparked a two-year financial corruption investigation as one of the darkest moments of his papacy.) 

Francis, lamented Pell, had progressively weakened the college of cardinals by his “eccentric nominations” and any new pope must understand that the secret to Christian vitality lies in “fidelity to the teachings of Christ and Catholic practices”, not in “adapting to the world or from money”. With the newest crop of young clergy and seminarians both orthodox and conservative in the main, a new pope must nip unacceptable doctrinal differences in the bud to avoid a schism: “The morality of homosexual activity will be one such flash point,” he warned. 

Even though Pell would not have been eligible to vote – cardinals over 80 cannot participate in the conclave – the brash Australian clearly believed he might still play a role as a kingmaker, urging like-minded cardinal colleagues to look into the future to try and imagine or even conjure the next, ideal church leader. 

This will all sound remarkably familiar to the cinemagoers who have seen Conclave, with its conflicts between the liberal American Aldo Bellini (Stanley Tucci), supported by British cardinal Thomas Lawrence (Fiennes), and the hardline Italian traditionalist Goffredo Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto).

It is reminiscent of the criticism Francis has faced from conservatives like Pell since the very beginning of his papacy, principally from cardinals in the United States and Africa, who feared a shift too far on issues of capitalism, on homosexuality, abortion and the role of women in the church. Lucian Msamati as the Nigerian candidate, Joshua Adeyemi, represents these social conservatives in the film.

But in a largely liberal western Europe, Francis has been accused of precisely the opposite of this kind of thinking: that he isn’t liberal enough. And it is from these quarters, too, that he continues to face some increasingly serious challenges. 

“Francis was elected to renew the Catholic Church,” Thomas Söding, vice president of the Central Committee for German Catholics, told Politico last year. “But the pope’s failure to bring about any meaningful change has left the church archaic and unfixed, forcing the Germans to try and beat their own path.”

Cardinal Reinhard Marx, the archbishop of Munich, for example, has played a key role in this debate, not only welcoming LGBTQ catholics but expressing openness to the ordination of women. Since then, progressive European Catholic factions have tried to harness the so-called synodality process, introduced by Francis to encourage a more consultative decision-making system inside the church and seizing powers traditionally left to the ordained in a concerted effort to force change. 

Although ultimately forced into a humiliating climbdown, the battle, led principally by the German and Belgian churches, has been described by some as the “greatest crisis since the Reformation”, prompting continuing dire warnings of a Catholic split.

Last year, not long after Pope Francis was rushed to hospital with a bout of bad flu, another anonymous memo signed “Demos II” appeared, this one thought to be the work of a committee of cardinals riffing anonymously off the late Pell’s musings. 

Unlike the Australian’s critique, this document conceded, if somewhat begrudgingly, some positive aspects of the current pontificate, from Francis’s concern for the weakest and poorest to his focus on the importance of environmental and natural resource issues. 

Still, Demos II complained just as loudly of “autocratic and at times vindictive styles of governance”, of a “carelessness in matters of law” and an intolerance “for even respectful disagreement”. Once again, Pope Francis stood accused of “ambiguity in matters of faith and morals and creating confusion among the faithful”.

In Conclave, torn by his own crisis of faith, Fiennes’s character counsels the polar opposite as he delivers a thoughtful homily to his fellow cardinals before formally opening the papal voting process. He tells them: “There is one sin which I have come to fear above all else… certainty. Certainty is the great enemy of unity and the deadly enemy of tolerance.”

Maria Antonietta Calabrò, whose investigative journalistic work led to the reopening of a homicide inquest into the 1982 “suicide” of the Vatican banker Roberto Calvi, found hanged on Blackfriars bridge in London, says the film deals with complex dynamics of power and religious politics in ways that are “not only realistic but very, very real within the Vatican”.

“An unforgettable line for me in the film is: ‘It’s a conclave! No. It is a war and you must take sides’.”

The word conclave itself stems from the Latin words cum clave meaning “with key”, a reference to the way cardinals are sequestered to elect a new pope, ostensibly isolated and safe from external manipulation. The tradition dates back to 1268 when, after nearly three years of deliberation, cardinals couldn’t come to a decision about their next pope, prompting Rome to hurry things up by locking them away and cutting their rations.

Gregory X ruled this would become the rule and today, the Sistine Chapel is swept for bugs and hidden cameras before the doors are sealed for the votes and the cardinals take the oath of secrecy in Latin. 

Just as is seen in the movie, votes are placed one by one in an urn, then mixed, counted, read out, and three cardinals pass a needle and thread through each one. Each round of voting papers is burned, but chemicals to create white smoke are only used once a two-thirds majority is reached and a new pope elected.

Oddly enough, the College of Cardinals is not obliged to select the new pontiff from its own ranks, although it is a near-certainty that it will do so at the next conclave. Nor does the process abide by the apostolic constitution that governs papal elections, which sets the maximum number of voting cardinals in a conclave at 120. Instead, this being ecclesiastical not divine law, the pope is free to tweak the numbers to his will and discretion. 

Popes have generally treated the 120 as a minimum number, not a maximum, tending to appoint new cardinals in batches to replace colleagues whose birthdays push them out of the vote. And just like more earthly political leaders, this also means they can at least try to stack the numbers with like-minded voters. 

In December, just days before his 88th birthday, Francis celebrated the 10th papal consistory of his pontificate. These ceremonies allow the pope to appoint new cardinals, and this time there were 21, including five from Latin America and two from Africa.

Surprise additions included an archbishop from Iran and the youngest of the new cardinals, Mykola Bychock, 44, the Melbourne-based Ukrainian archbishop. (The film also sees a shock papal candidate emerge from a conflict zone.) It means that two-thirds of the College of Cardinals today are now Francis’s choice, with Europeans representing less than half (45%) of the voting-age cardinals. 

Shaping the conclave is, of course, an age-old papal tradition, but the lead-up to the next one is set to shatter many of the ancient norms of secrecy and mystery, possibly even reducing the odds of the election of an 11th-hour, cinematic-style dark horse aspirant.

Hot on the heels of December’s consistory, it was revealed that the College of Cardinals has been thrust forcibly into the digital information age with the launch of an interactive website, ostensibly a detailed “who’s who” of all its members, along with detailed profiles of 12 of the so-called papabili – the most likely candidates to be elected the 267th successor of Saint Peter – and there are more to come.  

Led by Vatican specialists Ed Pentin and Diane Montagna, and researched by an international team of journalists, the site also shows exactly where the cardinals stand on 10 of the most important issues facing the church (and society), from the blessing of same-sex couples to making priestly celibacy optional to communion for the divorced and remarried. 

Historically, cardinals informed themselves on their colleagues’ characters and beliefs through private discussion and correspondence, but in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the number of cardinals was often no more than a dozen and most knew each other well. As far back as the 1550s and possibly even earlier, public notices, precursors to newspapers, were posted in Rome providing rudimentary detail on the leading candidates, but often this relied on rumour, not really a worthy informant. Later on, diplomats and other trusted scribes compiled more in-depth and reliable biographies known as tableau de cardinaux.

Pentin said these detailed manuscripts, which date back to the 18th century, are simply predecessors of the 21st-century digital project: “Ironically today, despite copious information accessible on the internet and through a smartphone, this kind of detailed and reliable research is harder to find, and so in greater demand than it was 500 years ago.”

Pope Francis stopped holding regular consistories with his cardinals – apart from the ceremony for new appointments – after the one held in February 2014, when he entrusted the keynote address to Cardinal Walter Kasper, a vocal supporter of scrapping the ban on communion for the divorced. His speech sparked an immediate and ferocious public rebellion from 13 senior conservative cardinals, among them the Italian Angelo Scola, Burke and Pell. This debate lasted several months, infuriating Francis, and no consistory worthy of the name has been called since.

Vatican observers say cardinals now have very few opportunities to meet and get to know each other, a reality exacerbated by geography as most of the recently created cardinals come from what Pope Francis describes as “periphery” locations. Indeed, a papal focus on Italy or Europe would be a historical anachronism as more catholics now attend Sunday mass in Nigeria than in all of western Europe. Two-thirds of the world’s 1.3 billion catholics live outside the west, a ratio that will rise to three-quarters by the middle of the century.

“It seems extraordinary that in this globalised information age the cardinals themselves have so little knowledge of one another,” said Pentin.

For Pope Francis, growing doctrinal tensions between a predominantly liberal Europe and an increasingly conservative global south have forced him into a place of paralysis, caught by conservatives demanding a return to tradition and pledging change to the left which he cannot deliver.

“No sane man would want the papacy,” says Tucci in Conclave. “The men who are dangerous are the ones who do want it,” responds a rival.