Earlier this year, before Pope Leo XIV entered the assembly of cardinals that would ultimately select him as the next leader of the Catholic Church, he watched the film Conclave to get an idea of what to expect. He wasn’t alone. Viewership of the movie, which starred Ralph Fiennes and Stanley Tucci as politicking cardinals, soared in the days after Pope Francis’s death as life mirrored art. Memes, the media and a livestream from Vatican City culminated in a sort of conclave mania never before seen in pop culture.
It made sense. Faithfully adapted from Robert Harris’s 2016 novel, Conclave depicted the religious meeting of its title as a bitchy and backstabbing Hollywood affair. The Real Housewives of Vatican City. It was easy, then, to imagine what was going on behind the closed doors of the real Sistine Chapel, where the real cardinals were voting on their real next pope. If the film was to be believed, it was a lot of vaping, whisper-shouting, and backroom deals. The reality, as shown in BBC Two’s new documentary Secrets of the Conclave, is infinitely more dull.
