Betting markets are hotting up ahead of the Oscars next Sunday night. There is also increased speculation about who will be the next pope, given the extended hospitalisation of 88-year-old Pope Francis with pneumonia and kidney failure. Bets are already being taken on the title the new man will take. Francis II is evens.
Almost as if by a divine guiding hand, Conclave, a film about choosing a new pope, has simultaneously emerged as a surprise front runner in awards season. The adaptation of Robert Harris’s 2016 novel has received a total of eight Academy award nominations. It has cut a swathe in the run-up to the big night, winning “best film” at ceremonies, including the BAFTAs, Screen Actors Guild, and Critics Choice.
A British film with a German director about a bunch of old men locked away to choose which of them should be leader does not sound like an obvious hit in Hollywood. The only women featured are a couple of nuns in charge of housekeeping. Isabella Rossellini, who plays Sister Agnes is a nominee for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar.
Yet since its release last August, the low budget US $20million production has already taken around $100m at box offices internationally and scored a remarkable 93% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Conclave has emerged as an Oscar favourite in part because its rivals have run into difficulties. Anora, an 18-rated feature about a pole-dancing sex worker, is just as unlikely Oscar fodder as Conclave. The Brutalist, which strives achingly for historic authenticity, and Emilia Perez, both controversially used AI.
The enduring significance of Conclave’s subject matter is central to its appeal. It turns out that billions of people, believers and non-believers, are interested in who is chosen to lead the Roman Catholic Church, one of the world’s major religions.
The author of Conclave, Robert Harris, started as a political journalist and historian. He researches meticulously for each of his sixteen novels. A central theme running through them is of decent people trying to navigate a way through difficult circumstances, most of them man-made. The contexts vary from ancient Rome to the English Revolution, to Belle Epoch France to the Second World War, to contemporary times and even to a dystopian future, but his protagonists are always caught up in a form of power politics.
Asked what inspired him to write Conclave, Harris says he spotted his favourite themes while watching news coverage after the death of Pope Benedict XVI. “When I saw those faces clustered at the windows, when the Pope goes on the balcony – worldly, cunning, benign – I thought I was looking at the Roman senate from Cicero’s days,” he told The Catholic Herald.
He also conceded that there is a unique spiritual dimension to Conclave: “If you treated the Vatican simply as if it were ICI or a secular organisation, you would miss the point.” There are lots of political operators in the church, but only they believe they are motivated by a higher power, doing God’s work.
The Vatican has suffered some lurid depictions in recent literary workers such as Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code books and David Yallop’s In God’s Name which speculates alarmingly what lay behind the brief thirty-three day pontificate of John Paul I. But the church welcomed Harris’s approach and gave him special guided access to some historic locations. They were still pleased some years later and granted similar co-operation to Peter Straughan, the award-winning screen writer who adapted the book.
All the action in the book and the film takes place in private in church property in Vatican City, moving between the pope’s apartments, the cardinals’ lodging house, Domus Sanctae Marthae, and the Sistine Chapel, where the conclave meets until white smoke from the chimney indicates that a new pope has been chosen.
It seems likely that the Conclave will be meeting for real again soon to choose the 267th Holy Father. Whatever happens at the Gemelli Hospital, the present pope makes clear in his recent memoir that he would consider resignation, like his predecessor Benedict.
The choices which the real cardinals will have to face are very similar to those confronted by Harris’s characters. They will have to pick out a winner from the spectrum from religious conservatism to liberalism, and between men of different personalities, from different continents. The real candidates though will be older than Ralph Fiennes and Stanley Tucci, and probably not as handsome.
Pope Paul VI changed the rules in 1975 so that only cardinals under the age of 80 may vote. That means only 138 in the present college of 252 are eligible. Nonetheless, of the four bookies’ frontrunners, only the 67-year-old Filipino Luis Antonio Tagle (3/1) is under seventy. He’s a progressive evangelical in Pope Francis’ mould.
Cardinal Peter Turkson (4/1) from Ghana is 76 and would be the first Black African pope. He is known for speaking out on social justice.
There has not been an Italian pope since John Paul I in the 1970s. The current Vatican Secretary of State, Pietro Parolin, 70 (5/1) fancies the job, but may have spoilt his chances by looking too eager. The leading conservative candidate is Péter Erdő of Hungary.
In all, up to 20 cardinals are “papabile” – credible candidates to be the next pope.
As elsewhere in international relations, Donald Trump will cast a shadow over the potential conclave. The Cardinal of San Diego Robert McElroy is a favourite of the present pope and has been heavily critical of Trump’s treatment of immigrants crossing the border. Trump likes the conservative Cardinal Dolan from his native state of New York and has underlined where his sympathies lie by sending another conservative Catholic, Brian Burch, as US ambassador to the Vatican. Diplomatic rivalries could count against the Canadian Marc Ouellet, as well as his age of 80. Cardinals from other continents may be tempted not to trespass into the North American minefield when they come to write their ballots.
The only certainty is that the next pope will not be as big a surprise as the cardinal chosen in Robert Harris’s plot. No spoilers. Read the book, see the film.