Director:  Edward Berger
Length: 2 hours

Six-Sentence Synopsis

Conclave (2024) follows Cardinal Thomas Lawrence, Dean of the College of Cardinals, who is tasked with overseeing the ancient and secretive process of electing a new Pope following the sudden death of the incumbent. As cardinals from around the world gather and are sealed inside the Vatican, four principal candidates emerge: Bellini, a progressive reformer; Adeyemi, a social conservative; Tremblay, an ambitious moderate; and Tedesco, a staunch traditionalist who wishes to reverse many of the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Lawrence’s efforts to conduct the conclave with integrity are complicated when he begins uncovering a web of secrets, including evidence that Cardinal Tremblay bribed fellow cardinals for votes, drawing him unwillingly into the political machinations he had hoped to remain above. The conclave is further destabilised by the arrival of Archbishop Benitez of Kabul, a figure of humility and moral courage secretly appointed as a cardinal by the late Pope, whose calm presence and impassioned plea for mercy over ideology gradually shifts the mood of the assembled electors. When a terrorist bombing outside the Vatican walls shatters the seclusion of the conclave, Tedesco calls for a declaration of religious war, and it is Benitez’s contrasting appeal to compassion and reconciliation that ultimately sways the cardinals to elect him as the new Pope. In the film’s closing moments, Lawrence learns that Benitez is intersex, a secret the late Pope had known and kept, and he chooses to remain silent, leaving the newly elected Pope to take office with the words “I am as God made me” still resonating as the film’s quietly radical final statement.

Doctrinal Dissection – ‘Sin & Grace’

The Church teaches that sin is fundamentally a turning away from God, a free human choice to reject the love and law of the One in whose image we are made, introducing into human nature a disorder that Scripture first traces to the Fall in Genesis 3, where the disobedience of Adam and Eve ruptures not merely a rule but the entire relationship between humanity and its Creator. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§1849) defines sin as “an offence against reason, truth, and right conscience,” and (§1850) as “an act contrary to eternal law,” while (§405) names the lasting consequence of original sin as concupiscence, the inherited tendency toward selfishness and wrongdoing that weakens but does not destroy the human will. Saint Augustine, who understood sin from the inside with devastating clarity, described it in his Confessions as the heart turned in upon itself, a love of self taken to the point of contempt for God, while Saint John Chrysostom taught that the deepest tragedy of sin is not the punishment it incurs but the distance from God it creates in the soul. Grace, by contrast, is God’s free and entirely unmerited response to this rupture, described in the Catechism (§1996) as a “participation in the life of God,” a real and transforming gift that heals what sin has damaged and elevates the soul toward union with him. Saint Paul establishes in Romans 5:20 that where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, making clear that grace is not merely a remedy but a superabundant divine generosity that exceeds and overwhelms the damage sin has done. Saint Thomas Aquinas, in the Summa Theologiae, taught that grace does not destroy nature but perfects it, restoring the human person’s capacity for genuine goodness and reordering their desires toward their true end in God, while Saint Bernard of Clairvaux insisted that grace is always the first movement, that even the desire to return to God is itself God’s prior gift to the soul. This teaching was given its most tender expression by Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, whose little way proposed that God’s grace meets the soul precisely in its poverty and weakness rather than its merit or achievement. Taken together, these scriptural, magisterial, and patristic sources present sin and grace not as abstract theological categories but as the twin poles of the central Catholic drama: a humanity that continually turns away from God, and a God who continually, at the cost of his Son’s life, turns back toward humanity with inexhaustible mercy. Conclave (2024) grounds its exploration of sin and grace in three concrete human transgressions: simony, which reduces the sacred to a transaction; sexual immorality, which reveals the gap between public holiness and private life; and pride, which transforms the search for God’s will into a contest of human ambition.

Berger constructs his examination of simony with quiet precision, revealing through the figure of Cardinal Tremblay that the corruption of the sacred for personal gain does not announce itself with obvious villainy but wears the face of competence, charm, and institutional loyalty. Tremblay’s manipulation of the conclave process, using influence and financial favour to smooth his path to the papacy, embodies the Church’s oldest and most corrosive institutional temptation: the reduction of what is holy to what is transactional, the substitution of human calculation for divine providence at the very moment the Church is supposed to be most attentive to the latter. In Catholic teaching, simony is not merely a canonical offence but a profound theological one, a desecration of the gifts of the Holy Spirit by subordinating them to human ambition and material exchange, treating the things of God as though they were available for purchase by those with sufficient cunning or resource. What makes Berger’s treatment particularly searching is his insistence that this corruption is not the work of obviously wicked men but of men who have convinced themselves that their ascent to power serves the Church’s genuine good, that the ends they pursue are holy even if the means they employ are not. This self-deception is itself a dimension of the sin, the capacity of pride and greed to dress themselves in the language of service and vocation. Yet the film does not leave sin without its answer in grace. It is precisely the unravelling of Tremblay’s machinations that opens the conclave to an outcome no human calculation had engineered or could have predicted, suggesting that grace operates not despite institutional corruption but through its exposure, clearing away what is false and self-serving so that something genuinely unexpected, unmanipulated, and therefore more credibly of God can emerge from the wreckage of human ambition.

Berger frames the film’s treatment of sexual immorality most searingly through the revelation surrounding Cardinal Adeyemi, whose private relationship with a woman and the child it produced stands in devastating contrast to the celibate authority he projects before his fellow cardinals and before the world. The sin here is not presented with prurient interest or cynical relish but with genuine theological and human weight: it is the gap between the life a man professes and the life he actually lives, the fracture between public holiness and private failure that has done more damage to the credibility of the Catholic priesthood in the modern era than perhaps any other single wound. Berger understands that this fracture is not merely a matter of broken rules but of broken trust, and that the deepest injury of such hypocrisy falls not on the institution but on the faithful who have staked their spiritual lives on the integrity of those who minister to them. The film also implicates the systems that enable such concealment, the culture of silence and self-protection that allows private sin to coexist indefinitely with public authority, suggesting that the institutional sin of omission compounds the personal sin of commission. And yet Berger is careful to allow grace its place within this exposure. The film does not deploy Adeyemi’s fall simply to condemn or to score points against clerical celibacy, but to humanise, suggesting that the same Church which demands holiness of its ministers is also the Church of confession, contrition, and the possibility of restoration. The acknowledgement of sin, however humiliating and however publicly devastating, is in Catholic theology always the first necessary movement of grace, and Berger honours this by refusing to allow Adeyemi’s exposure to function as mere scandal. In this sense the sexual immorality in Conclave functions not as a reason to despair of the institution but as a painful reminder that the Church has always been, in Augustine’s unflinching phrase, a field in which wheat and weeds grow together until the harvest, and that this truth applies as much to its princes as to its people.

Berger reserves his most penetrating and theologically subtle insight into pride for the film’s central character, Cardinal Lawrence, whose quiet self-possession, genuine integrity, and evident reluctance to seek power make his pride all the more difficult to detect and all the more spiritually dangerous precisely because it is so easy to mistake for virtue. Lawrence is not proud in the manner of the obviously ambitious cardinals who manoeuvre openly for the papacy; his pride is of an altogether subtler and more insidious variety, rooted in his own settled sense of being the one man in the room whose motives are truly pure, whose judgement can be trusted above the calculations of others, and whose very reluctance to pursue power paradoxically marks him out, in his own estimation, as the one most worthy of it. The Catechism, following Augustine and the entire tradition of moral theology, identifies pride as the root of all sin precisely because it displaces God from the centre of the soul and installs the self in his place, generating a spiritual self-sufficiency that closes the soul to the gift it most needs. Berger dramatises this with considerable sophistication, never making Lawrence simply unsympathetic but allowing the audience to watch his pride operate beneath the surface of his genuine goodness, the way a man’s best qualities can become the very medium through which his deepest spiritual disorder expresses itself. The film is at its most theologically rich in showing that pride of this refined and respectable kind is harder to dislodge than the cruder ambitions of Tremblay or the concealed failures of Adeyemi, because it is armoured by genuine virtue and therefore resistant to the self-knowledge that conversion requires. The grace the film offers in response comes through Lawrence’s confrontation with genuine and destabilising doubt, his admission before another cardinal that he no longer knows whether he believes, a confession that strips away the last layer of spiritual self-sufficiency and leaves him, in his poverty, paradoxically more open to God than he was in his certainty. It is a deeply and authentically Catholic moment: grace arriving not as a reward for virtue accumulated but as a gift given precisely and most powerfully at the point of acknowledged spiritual bankruptcy, the soul finally empty enough to receive what it could not manufacture for itself.