Recently released film “Conclave” is getting a lot of attention in Catholic circles. The movie is based on a book by the same name written in 2016 by Robert Harris. The movie depicts the election of the pope, hence the name “conclave,” the name for the gathering of cardinals who elect the pope. As with many movies coming out of Hollywood, “Conclave” has the glitz, glam, and star-studded cast. At surface level it seems to portray the Church accurately but dig even slightly below the surface and we can discover a movie riddled with factual errors and anti-Catholic histrionics. Bishop Barron wrote on X that this film checks “practically every woke box, [and that it] could have been written by the editorial board of the New York Times.” His advice is to “run away from it as fast as you can.”
We can discover two errors in this film. Both are actually quite simple to unmask. First, in the movie the pope dies suddenly of a heart attack. When the cardinals gather for the election, an archbishop shows up unexpectedly claiming that the pope made him a cardinal in pectore, that is, in secret. The movie continues, the archbishop is made a cardinal, and eventually this archbishop is elected the new pope. The issue is that this cannot happen. To become a cardinal, the man must be made such by the living Roman Pontiff at a consistory. Anyone who was made a cardinal in pectore is not yet a cardinal. Hence, this archbishop would never have been made a cardinal.
The second error is again simple to discover, but quite serious. At the end of the film another cardinal discovers that the recently elected pope was born intersex; biologically a woman but raised as a male. An intersex person has both male and female sexual characteristics due to the presence of both male and female anatomical characteristics. According to Father Fr. Tad Pacholczyk, a neuroscientist and Catholic priest, “intersex situations represent cases in which a person is either male or female, but has confounding physiological factors that make them appear or feel as if they were of the opposite sex, or maybe even both sexes. In other words, the underlying sex remains, even though the psychology or gender they experience may be discordant” (“Making Sense of Bioethics,” June 14, 2016). A female with some male sexual characteristics or a female who identifies as or was raised as male would be incapable of ordination, and therefore incapable of election to the papacy.
St. John Paul II’s apostolic letter “Ordinatio Sacerdotalis” reserves the priesthood to biological men. He wrote, “the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and… this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.” This is one of the strongest pronouncements a pope can make regarding a doctrinal issue. He was declaring a fact that is and has been infallibly taught according to the universal ordinary magisterium since the beginning of the Church. In essence, it means that this is no longer subject to debate, much like Christ’s divinity was definitively declared at the Council of Nicaea. Likewise, Pope Francis has consistently affirmed this Church teaching. While the recent Synod on Synodality encourages greater participation of women in leadership roles, this does not include the priesthood.
This teaching is based on God’s creation of males and females to exercise different roles. Just as a woman cannot become a father in the natural order, so too in the supernatural order a woman cannot become a “father.” Furthermore, our Lord was not bound by societal standards in his choice of a male only priesthood. As Father Carter Griffin, rector of St. John Paul II Seminary points out, “if Jesus wanted to ordain women priests, he would have” [but he did not].
