Concave: Men Without Chests, With Ovaries

The film Conclave dramatizes what the word means: Catholic cardinals who gather to choose a new pope.

What the film fails to convey is why anyone would want to be a Christian in the first place. OK, OK, screenwriter Peter Straughan (an admittedly lapsed Catholic) never aimed for an altar call at film’s end. But he bludgeons his intention to show us how the Church ‘re-finds her spiritual core’ amid today’s challenges.

Spiritual core? I thought that was Jesus manifest in faithful people who work together to achieve holy ends, in this case, choosing a new leader.

All we see in Conclave are a bunch of cloak-and-dagger post-believers uncertain and unhappy about how they got there in the first place. The cardinals (and one nun on a hot tin roof) repel each other. This center cannot hold.

Conclave’s high-end production seduces and distances us. Old-world beauty is offset by rituals and vestments and Latin prayers that cultivate more suspicion than respect: what goes on here, anyway? The elegantly ordered Church is more shadow than light.

 At core is doubt. Jesus brought not the Kingdom of God but the kingdom of doubt. So goes a stirring homily by lead Ralph Fiennes (magnificent), who addresses his fellow cardinals by insisting that ‘certainty is the enemy of tolerance and unity,’ that ‘faith lives only through doubt’, and finally, ‘we need a pope who sins and doubts!’ No prob with the former—we all fail.

But to fail to believe? Jeez. We all know how complicated the world is. For this reason alone, we need clear and certain faith wisely applied by Christian leaders.

We, the faithful, approach life’s impossible barriers through One who makes the Way. No one involved in Conclave got that memo. 

Concave men. Men without chests. Cardinals who need to reboot or get booted. Men who need to stop and gain wisdom from nuns stressed out on the periphery. Point well-taken: men, flesh out the Imago Dei with trustworthy sisters and get grounded.  

None of this quite prepared me for Conclave’s preposterous finale. Throughout the film, we catch sight of a slightly ghostly priest, a Mexican who was made a cardinal for daring feats of agape in dangerous places. An unknown, he goes to the head of the conclave and gets elected leader of a billion Christians.

Then, in the film’s last couple minutes, we discover (gasp!) the new pope-to-be—self-named ‘Innocent’—is intersex. As an adult, he discovered interior feminine organs and chose not to have them removed because, in his words: ‘I am what God made me to be, and my difference makes me more useful.’

The screenwriter tries to say that in a male-dominated church world, we need a man who is also a woman to balance things out.

Conclave gets it all wrong. Intersex is a broad term for a host of biological sex development disorders. As a rule, the handicap is recognized at birth; one is determined to be either male or female and has surgery to correct the aberration of other-sex vestiges. (I’ve walked alongside such intersex Christians who clearly identify as either male or female).

Sadly, many invoke ‘intersex’ as the basis for transgender thinking (‘I was born with a disconnect between my body and my thoughts about my body’). False. Trans-fantasies are a psychological and spiritual disorder, not rooted in biology.

The ‘concave’ pope-to-be may be virtuous, but not because of hidden female genitals. If the rest of the cardinals are any indication, even ‘Innocent’ will crumble under the weight of corrupt Rome. Conclave dramatizes a Church under the sway of a faithless ideology that leeches light from Jesus and His members.      

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