The pope is dead. Thomas Lawrence, the dean of the College of Cardinals, is in charge of gathering those men, the senior 130 or so bishops of the Catholic Church, in the Sistine Chapel. There, they will elect a successor to the throne of St. Peter.
They assemble from around the world in a brick-and-stone Vatican courtyard, mature and solemn men draped in red and black robes. They greet one another and file off to their sleeping quarters. As they whisk out of the square, they leave behind a soiled pile of cigarettes.
So goes one of the most striking scenes in director Edward Berger’s new film, “Conclave,” an imagined dramatization of the aftermath of the death of an unnamed fictional pope. “Conclave” is, if nothing else, a good time. You should see it. Peter Straughan’s screenplay is based on a novel by the thriller writer Robert Harris, who has this sort of thing down pat. There is a great deal of politicking and scandal and secret late-night burglaries. There are very fine actors, from Ralph Fiennes to Isabella Rossellini, glaring at one another and jousting over faith, doubt and power.
But the movie is also a smart meditation on what it means to believe in God in the modern world — all the smarter for its subtlety. Much of what it is saying about that is in that pile of cigarettes.
What secularism is and isn’t
(Focus Features) Ralph Fiennes stars as Cardinal Lawrence in director Edward Berger's "Conclave."
The philosopher Charles Taylor pointed out in his 2007 book, “A Secular Age,” that “secularism” is not the absence of religion (because religion is never absent; even groups that try to bar or dismiss it have to define it).
Instead, “secularism” is one way of defining what religion is. In a secular society, like the one all of us in the United States, Canada and Europe live in now, whether we believe in God or not, religion is understood to be a private choice of an individual.
Secular societies are governed by the principle of humanism. This is the notion that people can understand the universe, can govern it through science, and can shape ourselves through education, government and the exercise of our free choices.
Taylor points out that before the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, “religion” was not an institution like the Catholic Church or something you “converted” to because you found it compelling. Rather, “religion” was simply the background order of the universe. Angels, miracles, God’s will functioned much as we talk about the weather today — commonsense inevitabilities.
The weather doesn’t care whether you believe in it, but today, in a secular society in which religion has become one way in which humans might choose to see the world — well, suddenly, to many people, whether you believe in it carries high stakes indeed.
One reaction to the secularization of society was a vigorous reassertion of the authority and prestige of religion and a castigation of the sorts of modern authorities like science or the state that appear to defy it — the phenomenon sometimes called “fundamentalism.”
In response, those steeped in the humanism of the secular world see in any religion the forces that feel to them anti-humanist and bent on eradicating personal choice and the expressive individualism that has become central to contemporary Western society.
Key for Taylor, though, is that the process of secularization is irreversible. Despite the fears of opponents of fundamentalism and the hopes of its advocates, we are simply not going back. No society, no legislation, no enforcement can reverse a change so tremendous and bone deep as the rise of the secular age.
Religion in the secular age
Which brings us back to that pile of cigarettes.
The cardinals in “Conclave” are much like the cardinals evident in the history of the Catholic Church from the beginning — which is to say, a mixture of the earnest, tawdry, faithful, kind, flawed, fearful, generous, ambitious and corrupt.
According to Taylor, sitting at the transition from the Christian society before the Renaissance and the modern secular age was a way of thinking about religion he calls “providentialism” — that is to say, perceiving the power of God at work in the seemingly mundane world around us. These are the small miracles of coincidence; the sudden realization that things have fallen into place just so. Angels do not often appear in the providential world, but, as Taylor might put it, it might seem minutely enchanted nonetheless.
Taylor and many anthropologists of contemporary Christianity have pointed out that this is how many religious people in the United States actually experience what it means to have faith. This worldview relegates to the corner the blunt and blaring contest evident in so much public conversation about religion — arguments that often truck in caricature.
(Focus Features) Isabella Rossellini stars as Sister Agnes in director Edward Berger's "Conclave."
As the cardinals in “Conclave” stab one another in the back and work to further their own ambitions, something happens that, in fact, orthodox Catholic belief maintains has always happened. The right person, against all odds, becomes the pope. The various scandals, mistakes, plots and failures of the scheming cardinals all become public at precisely the right time, and the various papal hopefuls who would manifestly be terrible at the job fall by the wayside exactly when they should. At one point, an explosion rocks the Vatican at such an opportune time that it is hard not to see it as a rebuke against the vote that was just cast.
In short, there certainly seems to be a higher power at work in the film’s plot, even if it moves through human actions instead of angelic manifestations.
It is true that many orthodox Catholics find the film slanderous and anti-Catholic. But that perception derives from a sense of siege, from the hunched defensiveness that the secular age has imposed upon many believers who seek to find solace in doubling down on what they believe to be the pristine and miraculous authority of religion.
And yet, any look at the history of religion illustrates pretty clearly that it has virtually never been pristine and is only occasionally, and often surprisingly, miraculous. And yet, for believers, the deft hand of God might be present anyway.
Marilynne Robinson has written a series of novels about what it means to be religious in the modern world. The sudden sight of morning sunlight through wet trees after rain brings one of her characters to tears. He encounters beauty, and, in beauty, the sense of a divine order.
That order is present in “Conclave,” too.
Matthew Bowman is Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University.
Matthew Bowman is the Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University and the author of 2023’s “The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill: Alien Encounters, Civil Rights, and the New Age in America” and 2012’s “The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith.”
