It was mild relief that the film Conclave did not win “Best Picture” at the Academy Awards on Sunday. While the actual Holy Father is hospitalized in critical condition, it would have been awkward to celebrate a movie that opens with the death of a fictional pope. In any event, a film about Russian oligarchs and American prostitutes seemed to better capture Hollywood’s moment, and so Anora carted off the major awards, despite few people seeing it. 

Catholic commentators, including in the Register, have criticized Conclave as “an act of subversion, not only of the order of nature, but of grace itself” (Regis Martin) and of “[inverting] the roles of Thomas and Peter such that Doubting Thomas becomes Doubting Peter” (George Weigel). 

Critics took aim at a homily preached by Cardinal Thomas Lawrence that is the rhetorical heart of the film. The dean of the College of Cardinals, played brilliantly by Ralph Fiennes, declares that the “greatest sin is certainty.” He pleads with the cardinals to elect a “pope who doubts.” 

It should be noted that while Hollywood did not award Conclave the “Best Picture” Oscar, the awards season was nearly unanimous that Conclave was the best written film of the year. It won the award for “Best Adapted Screenplay” at the Academy Awards, and the script swept the most prestigious movie awards, also winning at the BAFTA (British), Critics Choice and Golden Globes.  

Conclave was the most-decorated script of 2024 — and at the heart of it was the “sin of certainty” speech. While Pope Francis would likely have objected to rather ornate vestiture in the film as not being his style, he likely would have appreciated that speech. Remarkably enough, Fiennes character’s homily anticipated an actual text of the Holy Father.  

“It is no good a person saying with total certainty that they have met God,” Pope Francis wrote in his autobiography, published in January. In the final lines of his book, which have the tenor of a final testament, the Holy Father expresses his own discomfort with certainty. 

“If someone has answers to all the questions, this is proof that God is not with them,” wrote the Holy Father. “It means that they are a false prophet, someone who exploits religion, who uses it for themselves. The great guides of God’s people, like Moses, always left space for doubt.” 

Compare those real-life papal words to the fictional preaching of Cardinal Lawrence: 

“There is one sin which I have come to fear above all others: certainty. Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. … Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt. If there was only certainty and no doubt, there would be no mystery and, therefore, no need for faith. Let us pray that God grants us a pope who doubts.” 

Conclave’s prescription for a future pope coincides with the current pope’s autobiographical reflections.  

Why might that be? 

Pope Francis, like the script of Conclave, is deeply suspicious of the clerical establishment, as witness the criticism that the Holy Father has given to the Roman Curia and his continuous inveighing against clericalism. In this, both the Pope and the film put themselves in a tradition extending back to the Old Testament’s prophets. The Church does not shy away from such fierce clerical condemnations; Ezekiel’s denunciation of the wicked shepherds of Israel is included at length in the breviary that priests pray daily. 

Nothing in Conclave or Pope Francis is as harsh as Jesus in Matthew 23. Much of the chapter excoriates the “scribes and Pharisees,” calling them a “brood of vipers” who, after converting a pagan, “make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves.” 

Such severe condemnations are not reserved only to the religious leaders of ancient Israel; they may well apply to clergy in every age. Early in Conclave the cardinals are discussing the late pontiff, with one of them telling Cardinal Lawrence that the pope had lost his faith. Cardinal Lawrence is astounded that a pope could lose faith in God.  

“Not in God,” clarifies Cardinal Aldo Bellini, played by Stanley Tucci. “What he had lost faith in was the Church.”  

The bureaucratic life of the Church can pose a danger to faith. Msgr. Ronald Knox, the noted 20th-century English Catholic theologian, alluded to as much when asked why he did not visit Rome: “He who travels in the Barque of Peter had better not look too closely into the engine room.” 

Condemnation of clerical corruption — which abounds in Conclave — is not contrary to the Gospel, but compatible with it. Yet the film makes a further claim, that doctrinal certainty itself leads to distance from the afflicted, a lack of compassion for the suffering, a corruption of the heart, and perhaps also the flesh, seeking worldly pleasure and power. 

That is something of a frontal challenge for a Church which proposes creeds — and prays them every Sunday — and publishes a universal catechism. 

Thus the critics are correct to consider Conclave an attack on the Church’s self-understanding as a custodian of the deposit of faith, handed on by Jesus Christ to the apostles. From the beginning of his pontificate, Pope Francis has repeatedly spoken about his office as existing precisely to preserve the doctrine of the faith. For example, speaking of the 2014 synod, he said that “everything happened cum Petro and sub Petro, that is to say, in the presence of the Pope, who is the guarantor for everyone of freedom and trust, and who guarantees orthodoxy.” 

The theatrical genius of the “sin of certainty” speech is that it combined two opposites — an office that exists for orthodoxy is to be held by a man who doubts. The Catholic understanding is different, namely that “to defend the truth, to articulate it with humility and conviction, and to bear witness to it in life are therefore exacting and indispensable forms of charity” — so said another real-life pope, Benedict XVI, in 2009. 

Getting that right in real life is rather more difficult that abandoning that challenge in the movies.