The 2024 film Conclave, which follows the drama of a fictional papal election, was broadly praised for its excellent cast, luxurious visuals, atmosphere of intrigue, and suspenseful storytelling. Peter Straughan’s multilingual screenplay even won an Academy Award. I admired all those virtues, but it was the final plot twist that kept me thinking about Conclave for days. This is your warning: if you haven’t seen Conclave yet, stop reading now and come back when you’re finished!
Given the film’s genre—Variety described it as a “thinking man’s thriller”—I was expecting a last-minute act of sabotage, or a heel turn by a character who seemed heroic. But when the soft-spoken Cardinal Benitez, having just accepted his election as supreme pontiff, revealed to Ralph Fiennes’s Cardinal Lawrence that he was an intersex person, the movie seemed to change keys entirely. A subject the film had only glancingly considered—sex and gender in the Church—was suddenly its most central point of conflict. What form that conflict might take, or what new growth might come from it, is left to the audience’s imagination. We don’t even see the new pope in his vestments: as Lawrence adjusts to the news, the blinds of sequester lift, sunlight returns to the cardinals’ residence, and the credits roll.
In the real world, we’re in the midst of a social panic about “gender theory,” while the Church has been chasing its tail on sex and sexuality for decades. So much energy goes into building up theology that depends on a rigid gender binary, and then building up defenses against practical challenges to it, that there is none left for imagining a better way forward—on that or any other issue. Perhaps that is why the ending of Conclave was so galvanizing; I didn’t expect a movie so in thrall to the Vatican’s rituals of power and so lopsidedly male in its cast to end with a spotlight on how patriarchy undermines the structures that attempt to enforce it.
Cardinal Benitez’s story, as the movie tells it, is certainly far-fetched: born in Mexico, but assigned to a string of war-torn dioceses across several continents; made a cardinal in pectore and never announced (but still somehow eligible to vote in the conclave); unknown to his brethren but able to win their hearts and votes with a well-timed, stirring, but decidedly vague speech. His intersexuality, however, is perfectly credible. Intersex people are born with ambiguous sex characteristics that make it difficult to classify them as either male or female. Statistics are elusive, because the condition manifests in many different ways and is often covered up at birth or concealed in the course of daily life. The Catholic Church benefits from that silence, because intersexuality is deeply threatening to the strict gender binary the Church holds to be foundational in society and in its own institutional structures.
Intersexuality cannot be dismissed, in the way other queer identities have been, as moral decadence or psychological defect. You can’t tell a person whose very body belies your strict binary that the conflict is all in their head. And every condemnation and accusation that recent Vatican documents have leveled at transgender people—that they want to deny the reality of their bodies as a gift from God; that they want to use technology to construct an alternate reality; that in “mutilating” themselves surgically, they reject the goodness of God’s creation—is turned on its head by the reality of intersex people. God, apparently, wills the existence of humans for whom the gender binary does not suffice. Not for nothing does Benitez choose to be called “Innocent.” He is a stumbling block for the Church, but he has done nothing to cause himself shame.
After I saw Conclave, I learned about the life of Sally Gross, an advocate for intersex rights and awareness who had once been known as Fr. Selwyn Gross, OP. Under that name, Gross, who, like the character of Benitez, was assigned male at birth, studied and wrote about interfaith relations (having converted from Judaism) and other theological topics. But the discovery of her physical and chromosomal differences put her at odds with her religious community, and she was ultimately pushed out of both the Dominican order and meaningful participation in Catholic life altogether. She returned to her native South Africa, where she became a Quaker and worked as an activist for intersex causes until her death in 2014. “Had there been a willingness to find a way of accommodating my religious vocation,” she told a reporter in 2000, “a way could have been found without too great a difficulty, although it would have taken a lot of courage.” Perhaps the greatest flight of fancy in Conclave is the idea that the unnamed, recently deceased pope would have found the courage to make such an accommodation for Benitez.
Those whose bodies give the lie to simplistic formulas about sex and gender—people like Sally Gross—are few enough in number to be pushed aside and silenced, sacrificed for the greater good of the patriarchy. But what if that peripheral identity suddenly irrupted in the very center of the Church? That is the question posed by the final plot twist of Conclave, and it is hardly cheap or sensationalistic. It seems, in fact, very much in line with the real-life Pope Francis’s constant call for the Church to extend itself in seeking out the marginalized. Benitez ends his pivotal speech by telling his brother cardinals, “The Church is what we do next.” The movie’s final shift left me pondering what the real Church could do next, if only it had the courage to admit it has more to learn.
