129: Conclave (2024), the Papacy, and Right-Wing Catholicism
In this immediately out-of-date episode, Daniel and Jack discuss the 2024 movie Conclave in light of the (at the time of recording) underway 2025 Conclave in the Vatican to choose a new Pope. Both your hosts talk a little about their own religious backgrounds, review the film, and then get onto the politics of the Catholic Church, particularly the integration of right-wing US bishops with American reactionaries. Episode Notes: https://www.ncronline.org/culture/book-reviews/playing-god-traces-history-catholic-conservatism-gone-extreme https://publicseminar.org/2024/08/the-catholic-new-right-and-project-2025/ https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/catholic-right-celebrity-conversion-industrial-complex?srsltid=AfmBOooTq0kt0MevV9R8VfOMTL3vn5n2JBO1URs0O1qbA9760WPUWsRa https://www.politico.eu/article/vaticans-church-catholic-pope-francis-hard-right/ https://sojo.net/magazine/march-2019/rise-catholic-right https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/28/maga-catholics-vatican-pope-conclave https://youtu.be/Mb3zYyhrUWg?si=d1UG7bpGi16WAaRo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKW-0fIDHdw&t=220s Show Notes: Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay ad-free and independent. Patrons get exclusive access to at least one full extra episode a month plus all backer-only back-episodes. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper/posts Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618&fan_landing=true IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's (Locked) Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ Jack's Bluesky: @timescarcass.bsky.social Daniel's Bluesky: @danielharper.bsky.social IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1
If we liberals are not united, Tedesco will become Pope.
You have no idea how bad it became, Thomas.
The way he and his circle attacked the Holy Father towards the end.
The smears, the leaks to the press.
It was savage.
He fought him every single day of his pontificate.
And now that he's dead, he wants to destroy his life's work.
If Tedesco becomes Pope...
He will undo 60 years of progress.
You talk as if you're the only alternative, but Adeyemi has the wind behind him.
Adeyemi?
Adeyemi, the man who believes that homosexuals should be sent to prison in this world and hell in the next.
Adeyemi's not the answer to anything, and you know it.
If you want to defeat Tedesco...
Defeat?
This is a conclave, Aldo.
It's not a war.
It is a war, and you have to commit to a side.
Hello everybody, Jack from the future, popping in to acknowledge the fact that this episode that Daniel and I recorded about the movie Conclave and about the upcoming election of the new Pope, we recorded it on the first day of the Conclave before the choice had been made.
It's now a bit out of date, but even so I think it holds up.
So they've chosen this guy Prevost to be the new Pope, Leo XIV, the first American Pope.
Not going to get into the question of him, except to mention...
Here, that the choice of Prevost has immediately driven MAGA completely insane.
You have Laura Loomer screaming on Twitter about how he's a woke Marxist, Cernovich, etc, etc.
And, of course, they've already started transvestigating him, which is an interesting irony, given the movie that we're going to be discussing in this episode.
So that at least is fun, or sort of fun.
It counts for fun in this context.
Anyway.
That being said, I hope you enjoy this now drastically outdated episode.
Here we talk about the far right, their fellow travellers, and what they say to each other when they think we're not listening.
The show is hosted by Daniel Harper and me, Jack Graham.
We're both he-him.
Be aware, we cover difficult, sometimes nasty subject matter, so content warnings always apply.
And welcome back to I Don't Speak German, the podcast that, well, this time anyway, it's a podcast about Catholicism.
All about Catholicism.
Really, the way into the...
Oh, hello, Daniel, by the way.
Or Cardinal Harper, I should say.
Cardinal Harper, yes.
That's a pathetic joke.
It's fine.
My elementary school's mascot was a cardinal, so that's enough, right?
Oh, yeah.
That's possibly doxing, but I think about a third of all elementary schools in the U.S., particularly in the Deep South, have a cardinal as their mascot, so it's fine.
I assume you mean a little red bird as opposed to a guy in a hat.
As opposed to a guy in a weird hat.
Sorry, I do not intend to be disrespectful to Catholicism in this episode, but I was about to be...
Very disastrous Catholicism.
So anyway, let's move on.
Yeah.
So we're in Conclave here.
I don't speak German.
The doors are locked.
The windows are blocked.
We've given up our devices.
We have electromagnetic sensors, you know, like static bombs, so no one can listen in to us.
So you should not be able to hear us until after the Conclave is over.
Absolutely.
And as usual, we are awash in various different types of smoke.
We're recording this as the Curia, the College of Cardinals, are actually in conclave at this very moment.
I mean, they're probably all in bed now, but they are in the process.
These guys do average like 75 years old.
They've been in bed for several hours at this point.
Yeah.
But they are locked in, or at least in their dorms.
I don't know exactly how it works.
And having just watched the movie Conclave, I'm really none the wiser about how it really works.
But that's fine.
Apparently, for the movie, they designed the sets to be more prison-like for the movie.
It's a much homier place in real life than it is in the movie.
But also apparently the shade of red that they chose is much less garish than the one that they're actually showing, the one that the Cardinals actually wear.
It is much brighter and harder on the eyes.
And apparently if you watched the whole film where every character was wearing that color.
This is something I was going to raise, because I watched the movie, and then I almost immediately went on to watch the news reports about the conclave that is currently underway.
In Rome, in the apex of the Catholic Church, to decide who will be the next Supreme Pontiff.
And yeah, watching the news footage of the Cardinals arriving to Conclave, it did strike me.
Yeah, their clothes, they don't look anything like as easy on the eye as the clothes that they wear in the movie.
Yeah, I did so much research, I read the Wikipedia page for the movie and did a little bit more like Googling.
So, like, the amount of research that Jack did for this one was way higher than the amount that I did.
But, you know, that's going to be fine.
Well, don't promise them too much.
Okay.
But, yeah, as I say, they are currently in the process of choosing the next pope.
We just had some black smoke earlier, so no pope yet.
No, no pope.
There is no leader of the Catholic Church.
That's right.
The Catholics are voterless at this point, you know.
That's right.
We are still popeless.
Sede vacante, I think, is what it's called in Latin.
The throne is vacant or the chair is empty or whatever it means.
But on the past form of the last few years, it'll be maybe, you know, a couple of days, tomorrow or the day after.
And they will have chosen one.
It'll be maybe two or three days, yeah.
No, that's normal, yeah.
I mean, it is a little bit different this year because apparently, from what I've been reading, there's more cardinals involved than there have been in recent years, and they're more widely dispersed from all over the world.
A lot of them were appointed in the last few years by the late Pope Francis, and a lot of them don't know each other.
And apparently these things are unusual in the conclave.
It might be a little bit different this year.
You mean it might be a little bit more complicated when they were like 80% Italians?
It's possible, yeah.
Apparently they need name tags for the first time this year because these guys just don't know each other.
I'm just imagining the super high investments and the pomp and circumstance and then they're just slapping on, hello, my name is Cardinal Richelieu or whatever.
Yeah, Cardinal Richelieu.
I'm really hoping that they are really cheap stickers with the names written on in Sharpie.
Or lanyards, like you're working in the tech industry and you've got to badge in and badge out.
I'm just sorry.
It's hard not to be a little bit sacrilegious in this.
Believe me, I'm not trying to be.
We're pointing out the ironies here.
And the film does as well, in a very light way.
And I think in a way that is enjoyable for everyone.
Sorry, I am just very cognizant of the fact that I am in no sense Catholic.
I was not brought up Catholic.
We will get to this, but anyway.
Well, let's do this now.
We are going to be, I suppose, maybe slightly poking fun here and there.
We are definitely going to be poking fun.
Like, there is no sense in which we are not going to be poking fun.
But, yeah.
And, of course, the Catholic Church is an institution that is open to all sorts of criticism.
On all sorts of avenues.
And, you know, I'm not going to stint on that, making my political criticisms, if it comes up.
That's a different thing.
That's a different thing, of course.
Yes, of course.
Having said that, I think we both want to stress, we don't mean to be disrespectful to people of faith, Catholic or otherwise.
Yeah.
About the question of the death of the Pope or the choosing of the next one or about their faith in general.
You know, I'm not a religious person.
I'm not a Catholic or a religious person at all.
I'm not interested in offending anybody or being disrespectful to anybody.
No, no, absolutely.
Absolutely.
And I think it's important, at least I'm going to say, you know, like kind of my background.
I grew up in the American South.
I grew up in like middle Alabama, like dead center of Alabama.
There is no Catholic presence.
And anywhere near the area I grew up, if you Google for a map of Catholic density by county in the U.S., you'll find a map.
It's like a user-generated map.
It's like somebody just created it.
But I believe it is the entire Deep South, basically the entire Confederacy outside of Texas, where you have a bunch of Latino immigration.
And they bring Catholicism with them.
There are no Catholic people in the entire Deep South.
It just doesn't exist.
And of course, there are historical reasons for that.
I think we might get into some of the political implications as we go through this episode.
But I think I met the first person that I knew who was Catholic when I was 16 or 17 years old.
And even now, I run into people who are Catholics every now and then, even living in Michigan.
But it is not, you know, it's certainly more of a presence here, but it's not like a huge presence the way it would be on, like, you know, the Northeast Corridor in, you know, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, etc.
You would see, you know, a lot more in, like, New England, Mid-Atlantic.
You would see a lot more, you know, Catholic influences, like a political dynasties.
But down here, it's, or down where I grew up, it was entirely this kind of evangelical Christianity and, you know, actively anti-Catholic.
So as to say, I really respect people who grew up in Catholicism and then come to these politics, and they have really trenchant things to say about their upbringing and shit.
But I would love to have one of those people here and then to join in solidarity.
But I'm just saying, you talked to me about the vestments and I'm just like, I don't know.
I didn't grow up with this.
This is not my world.
I'm sorry.
It's just not my world.
So I come at this as an outsider, and I think it's important to note that.
Yeah, and my story, oddly enough, is very similar.
I mean, you talked about growing up down south.
There was a Jewish guy who was in the Confederate government.
I don't believe there were any Catholics in the Confederate government.
I don't believe there were any Catholics in the Confederate government, no.
So the Confederacy had a Jewish guy before they had any Catholics.
Yeah.
I mean, the history of Catholicism in America is fascinating.
But, I mean, we'll get there.
I'm talking about my own experience growing up in Britain.
Obviously, Britain, Catholicism, there's a bit of a history there.
I grew up, to the extent that I had a religious upbringing at all, it was entirely within the Church of England, the Anglican Church.
And that was just because it was in school.
It's what you grew up with.
You're just there.
It's what I grew up with, yeah.
And, you know, we don't need to get into the Reformation.
But, I mean, it's a fascinating subject.
Let's relitigate the last 700 years of European ecclesiastical history.
Right, so Martin Luther...
Because this audience really needs us to talk about Martin Luther.
That's the thing.
Well, I mean, I could.
It's interesting, but it's not what we're here to do.
So, as I say, I grew up in Britain in the 80s, entirely within the orbit of the Church of England, which is very...
I mean, somebody once said, you know, growing up in the modern era in the Anglican Church is almost...
Inoculating you against religious fanaticism.
And I know what that means.
I've never really been religious except when I was a very small kid.
I very, very quickly realized that I had no use for religious faith.
It's not that I'm...
I'm not dismissing people of faith or anything like that.
I think you and I both went into a little bit of the hard atheist phase in our 20s and have since grown up a bit.
I don't want to speak out of turn, but I certainly did.
I'm certainly not a political atheist anymore, but in terms of my metaphysical beliefs, I'm still a pretty hard-line materialist.
I'm a hard atheist.
I'm a hard materialist in terms of that.
But the mockery, just like the Sam Harris, the Richard Dawkins, that era of new atheism really spoke to me for a while.
And it's sort of like, you're an invisible sky daddy.
Doesn't let you masturbate or whatever.
Like, it's like, it's, you know, I don't know.
Like, it was, I mean, it was edgy at the time, and it just feels, like, really gross now.
You know, like, I'm sorry.
I was 25 or whatever.
Like, it's fine.
But also, like, you know, grew up, you know?
Yeah.
It's similar here.
You know, we only have to look at the trajectories of the people involved to see what was really going on there.
And, yeah, I was sort of semi-seduced for a while and quickly realized what was actually going on.
So, yeah, political atheism, particularly of that kind, is not something I have any use for at all.
Re-Catholicism, I mean, Catholicism basically, in my experience anyway, has very little role in British public life.
I mean, there is a British Catholic Church.
There are British Catholics, obviously.
I think I was looking at the demographic, it sounds like 9% of the UK population is Catholic.
Yeah, and I think I read somewhere that practicing Catholics are on course in the United Kingdom to outnumber practicing Anglicans, because Anglicanism is in long-term decline in terms of actual worship.
Well, and this is one of those things of, you know, where, you know...
My daddy was Catholic, and his daddy was Catholic, and my daddy was Anglican, and his daddy was Anglican, and so, you know, sorry, daddy is probably not the term that you guys would use, but you know what I mean, like, you know, and like, people who kind of grew up in it, who like are, I am nominally Catholic, I go to the, I go to church, you know, on the high, on the holy days, etc., but it doesn't really impact my life other than that, and there are like, you know, people who like, really like, fully are like, Catholic, Catholic, you know.
As with many, like, kind of cultural religions, you know.
And Catholicism is a growing religion worldwide, although I think that's more to do with its spread in Asia and South America, which is not really...
Asia, South America, and Africa, yeah, no, absolutely.
Yeah.
In what we call the developing world.
Perhaps condescendingly, but you know what I mean.
Anyway, continue.
Yeah, that's the term that's used.
The first Catholic I knowingly knew in my life I met at university, and that was a young man of my age who was a Catholic convert.
It was a young man who had not been brought up in it.
I probably do know Catholics, but I don't know that I know them because it doesn't come up.
Religion is a very, at least individualism.
I mean, aside from being very interested in its history, that's really my entire history with Catholicism.
Yeah, absolutely.
I agree.
It is entirely possible that somebody I interact with on a day-to-day basis is a practicing Catholic, at least in the cultural Catholic.
I go to the Holy Days, et cetera, whatever.
But again, I don't know anybody who wears the crucifix, the more really aggressive stuff.
I did have a brief period between the ages of 16 and 23, in which I consider myself a pretty strong Christian, but I was a more of the non-denominational, seeking Christian.
Basically, I read Mirror Christianity, and it blew my 16-year-old brain, and I really embraced its teachings for a while and really embraced understanding what a progressive Christianity would look like.
And that was a really formative time in my life that I really respect that person, but I'm not that person now, if you understand what that means.
My religious phase was when I was...
Very young.
And it was to do with the fact that I went through a very strong phase in childhood of being just completely blown away by the natural world and science and space and stuff like that.
And thinking about those things in terms of the creator was how my young brain tried to parlay my intense feelings of overwhelming fascination.
I mean, I remember being like six or eight years old.
I mean, I remember being in first grade and hearing things about God and going like, well, that's fucking bullshit.
I thought God was a nonsense proposition from the time I understood the term cognitively, basically.
That's how hardcore an atheist I was for most of my life.
Anyway, not to...
I'm just saying, I have no use for the hypothesis sort of answer there, but I did go through a period in which I took it very seriously and I took my faith very seriously and I read a lot of books about theology and tried to really grapple with some of the ideas and consider myself a Christian even though I was not attending church regularly, etc.
So anyway, again, I just think it's an interesting perspective.
Yeah.
So I think we've done that bit.
Yeah, we've done that bit.
I hope nobody will take any of this to be disrespectful to people with faith, because that's absolutely not how it's intended.
No, no, no.
I think having said our background a little bit and kind of exposed ourselves on this, I think people will be a little bit more lenient in terms of, you know, understanding if we're telling jokes, it is from a place of respect, etc.
You know, anyway, so.
And also, you know, lack of respect for huge, powerful, reactionary institutions.
Absolutely, absolutely.
You know, love the Catholics, hate the Catholic Church, you know, as it were.
Something like that, yeah.
So, as I say, the Conclave is currently in motion.
They are picking the next one.
That's an interesting political phenomenon.
It's not really what we're talking about, except insofar as we are going to be talking a little bit about the 2024 movie, Conclave, which...
Probably a lot of people are renting and streaming at the moment.
Apparently it had a spike of downloads right after the Pope dies.
Way to strike the pan while the oil is hot there, guys.
And of course, from a podcasting viewpoint, it's too good to let it go.
It's relevance window, relevance window.
So I watched this for the first time.
The yesterday or the day before yesterday in preparation for this, I think you did the same.
I would, I think Monday, I think either Sunday or Monday, it was one or the other, but yeah.
So what'd you make of it?
I quite liked it.
I, I, you know, you recommended this one and it was really like you and I were chatting and you know, you were like, we were joking.
It's fine.
Like Jack and I do, Jack and I do not like get up and you know, it's.
We are very friendly with each other, but I think we were having a conversation.
It's like, well, we just do whatever you said.
We just do whatever you suggested.
Well, because I suggested it and you go, okay, let's do that.
And then we do it.
Because I'm easy going.
Well, it's just because I do it and then I make it happen.
And I say, okay, let's schedule it and do it.
And then you said, well, okay, let's do, or later on, let's do Conclave.
And I did the same thing.
I'm like, okay.
And then I watched it and we scheduled it and now we're doing it.
I kind of, you know, with the, I didn't know anything about the movie.
I had just kind of seen the comments on it and everything.
And I'm just like, this is going to be kind of a stilted, you know, very actor bait, you know, kind of like drama about like the problems of faith and the stresses of, you know, believing in God in the modern world.
And it's going to be like this kind of turgid, not period drama, but you know what I mean?
Like, it's just going to be this like, you know, basically stiff and boring.
You know, like, Oscar-made picture that's going to give, you know, where there's great acting, but, like, I just don't, I'm just not going to care about it.
Like, you know, I've seen a bunch of those movies.
Like, it's fine.
This was, this was, this was very different.
And this has, this is a beating heart in it.
I think the first scene I really enjoyed was when the Cardinals are starting to go into the Conclave, like, they're kind of planning to go in where they're going to be, they can't have, they're not allowed to leave until the decision is made of who the next Pope is going to be.
And you see, like, these three cardinals just sitting there, like, having their last cigarettes, you know, in a circle for the next, you know, for the next however many days and just, like, enjoying that.
And then you see, like, the cigarette butts on the ground where they're, like, you know, chain-smoking.
And you see this one, like, old guy cardinal, like, you know, swiping right at his phone, just, you know, doing the...
And it's like, no, I mean, this movie has a beating heart.
It, like, understands.
We're in the modern world.
This is a political institution.
This is a human institution.
And we're obeying these rights because they're rights that, you know, by the authority of the church, by the, you know, our mortal authority rests on the ability for us to follow these rights in a certain way.
And so, of course, we follow these rights.
But it does, and it's filled with, like, human beings.
You can't put Stanley Cucci in a movie and think it's going to be, like, this, you know, tight-ass kind of movie.
Like, you know, Stanley Cucci just brings humanity to everything.
He's just, like, he just can't help himself.
And I kind of love it for that.
It's a little bit, for what it's doing, there's a little bit, not a whole lot of meat on the bone for me.
It's a little bit more of a sketch than a real painting of a story.
I think it gets a little bit caught up in intriguing coincidence.
But I really enjoyed the film.
I mean, it's something that I would recommend.
Like, yeah, sure.
And apparently the details of the conclave itself are...
Very, very accurate.
Like, I read, and apparently, like, you know, people who kind of know the insides of how these things work are like, they actually kind of nailed it.
So, you know, it really taught me, like, now that there's a conclave happening, I'm like, okay, now I kind of know what that looks like, because I've been told this is pretty accurate.
So, yeah.
I enjoyed it.
It's good.
It's overall good.
We often don't say these movies are good.
It's like, yeah, well, this is shit, you know?
Everybody loves it.
This is shit.
This one, actually pretty good.
Should it have won some Oscars?
I mean, it won Best Adaptive Screenplay, I think, is when it won.
I don't know what it was up against.
I haven't seen those other movies.
But, you know, it works.
It's good.
I mean, it's a good movie.
Yeah, I found it pretty refreshing to watch a movie made in recent years that is so clear and coherent, to be honest.
You know, visually coherent and visually clear and narratively so.
And the ideas are pretty clear.
Yeah, it just really hangs together.
It's quite involving.
It's a nice little low stakes.
Well, not low stakes.
It's high stakes.
It's a very small character drama, ultimately.
And it's got a handful of actors playing against each other in what is an interesting way.
And you don't see these little but big movies made anymore.
Again, I'm agreeing with you.
I appreciated that.
Yeah.
And a great cast.
I think Ralph Fiennes has given some terrible performances in his time.
I think he's giving a really good performance here.
We have the Tucci, obviously, as you say, Stanley Tucci, who I think is constitutionally incapable of giving an uninteresting screen performance.
John Lithgow, who, of course, has utterly disgraced himself now.
Who is about to completely destroy his entire legacy by being in the Harry Potter HBO series.
The capstone of his career is...
Fuck trans people.
I've always loved John Lithgow.
This one hurts me that he's been informed and he's just choosing not to give a shit.
Yeah, he's just powering through it.
But he's good here.
He's good here.
He's good here.
I love John Lithgow as an actor.
Always have done.
And yeah, he's good in this.
I remember him from Harry and the Hendersons, which I saw as a very small child.
Well, I remember him, ironically, first, I think, from The World According to Garb.
And if you know that film, then you know the role that he plays in that.
The ironies are just impossible.
No, I've loved John Lithgow in everything.
He's been in so much stuff.
Sorry, that's just the one that I remember him as.
As a kid, when you're seven years old and see the Bigfoot movie and he's the lead in that, it's just one of those things of, of course, that's the thing I'm...
I'm always going to imprint on Lithgow as that.
He's also in Bombshell.
He plays Roger Ailes, and he's also very good in that one.
That's a future bonus we're going to be doing, so just to be aware of that.
Yes, the movie about Fox News and Roger Ailes and the sexual harassment thing.
Yeah, that's coming up, so yeah.
And Isabella Rossellini, for God's sake.
And one of my criticisms of this film is that she is not given enough to do.
She has her great...
The big sort of turn scene where she intervenes, and that's great, but she's not given enough to do.
No woman is good.
I mean, I understand why, because we're talking about the conclave of cardinals.
But we have the subplot about the nun from Africa who's brought in to embarrass the African cardinal who's the frontrunner at one point, Sister Shinumi.
And she has no lines.
We don't even get to hear her.
Yeah.
You know, and that's frustrating.
Particularly then, you get kind of that character, the African Cardinal, Adeyemi.
He's sort of whitewashed by the movie, despite the fact that, you know, he's clearly texturally, you know, an anti-LGBTQ bigot.
Yeah, the politics definitely get, you know, sanded away a little bit here, for sure.
Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, particularly where it goes at the end, and I think we are going to be spoiling it, but yeah.
The good guy wins in the end, it turns out.
Congratulations.
Yeah.
But yeah, I think ultimately the interesting thing about this is that it's not really about the papacy or Catholicism at all.
I think it is fundamentally a political drama.
Just about process and about how process gets in the way of politics with content, with good constructive content.
And maybe process might even have some clever stuff to say about how political process and the frustrations and the irrationalities of political process kind of do help the right.
And I think ultimately this is about, I mean, Robert Harris, The author who wrote the novel that this is based upon, he was very much a Blairite in the 90s.
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
So he's very much aligned with that sort of managerial, technocratic, centrist, moderate, liberal kind of pragmatic politics.
He totally would have voted for Tremblay.
That's the answer, right?
Well, I mean, I think...
The main character, Cardinal Lawrence, played by Ralph Fiennes.
He was apparently Italian in the original novel.
Oh, really?
Yeah, I don't know.
I read the synopsis of the novel.
I was not going to read the novel, but I did read the Wikipedia synopsis.
It matches the movie really closely, so I imagine they actually did adapt this pretty closely.
And one of the major changes is that it's not Lawrence, it's like Liponi or something.
I mean, he is actually Italian.
So the scene in which he's sitting...
At the Italian table, and they're talking about, like, we're the Italians, we sit together, and they're like, but, like, you know, you know, Ralph Fiennes is English, you know, he should be sitting in another table.
Anyway, I think in the book it made a lot more sense there, but, you know, anyway.
Yeah, it made sense, actually.
Yeah, now you mention it.
But in the film, he's an Englishman, and I kind of suspect that Ralph Fiennes is semi-basing his performance on Robert Harris himself.
If you watch, if you go to YouTube and you watch interviews where Robert Harris is talking, There's a similarity there.
And I suspect that the character, whether he's Lawrence or the Italian name, whether Harris is conscious of this or not, I feel like he's kind of a picture of that kind of person.
The slightly disillusioned, technocratic, liberal centrist who's trying to find their way through the maze of establishment politics, whatever it is, whether it's British prime ministerial politics or...
The politics of the paper.
UK electoral policy, yeah.
Yeah, the name was Lomeli.
Finding himself very ambivalent about it.
Yeah, the name was Lomeli in the novel.
I just looked it up again.
I didn't say Lupito or something, but you know.
All Italian names send the light to me.
I'm racist against Italians, you know?
It's just a thing.
We're respectful to Catholics, but Italians, fuck them.
Fuck Italy, yeah.
I might get in trouble.
I once made a joke about the Greeks that it was like, I saw no end of grief over that.
So that is a joke.
That is just a joke, believe me.
Seriously, because the Greek joke is very clearly satire.
Yeah, no, no.
It's fine.
It's fine.
I'm not mad about it.
I get it, but it was also like, clearly, do you understand?
That's the point I'm making here.
Anyway, we're not going to link to that.
We're not going to go back to that.
I'm just saying it was just one of those things.
Anyway, so yeah.
That's how I read it.
I read it as a story basically about how people in politics with political convictions are all basically sincere, because they all are, even the conservatives.
The unpleasant conservatives are sincere in this, but they let that get in the way of doing the right thing.
And the political process gets in the way of the best thing being done for everybody.
And ultimately, the good candidate, the correct candidate, the one that gets chosen, is the one who's non-ideological.
He's just a good man.
That's the idea, isn't it?
I think Lithgow's character is Tremblay.
I think he's portrayed as being a decent person, but incapable or not.
Not up to the task because he's ambitious.
Because he's, you know, willing to use his, like, political machinations.
Whereas the rest of them are, you know...
It's funny, like, you would think in a movie like this, you would see more, like, active politicking.
It's like, you know, there are people, like, you know, forming alliances or, you know...
But really, all we see in the film is, you know, we sit at a long set of tables together and we're told, write down the name of the person.
And then we see, like, a handful of conversations just between our leads.
But never, like, you know, what's actually going on behind the scenes.
And I think that's, like, you know, if anything, I think that is a weakness of the film is, like, I would like to see more of, like, how the different factions are arguing, you know, because I'm interested more in that political process.
Yes.
And here it's just kind of treated as, like, a fait accompli that, you know, ultimately there are a handful of candidates and we're following kind of our team around and kind of, like, how they're, you know, navigating this.
That's certainly a way to tell the story.
I'm not arguing with that, but it is something that I think is a weakness, something that I would like to see as more of the interpersonal, interdenominational strife.
How are they navigating these waters?
How are the traditionalists dealing with this influx of popularity for these other candidates?
That's not the story we're telling, but I think it would be...
You know, an interesting side point.
It's something that I think is missing from the film, because really all we see is, like, the voting sessions, basically, and then the kind of interpersonal dramas.
We're really just following Ralph Fiennes around while he, like, cleans up messes, basically.
You know, it really is, like...
Yes, and sort of does detective work about scandals and things.
When the voice of God on Earth tells you you're a manager and not a shepherd, you know?
I mean, that does really, like, reading into your reading of the film, it's like Fiennes is taking his performance from the author's voice.
And then that author is being told, like, you're a manager.
Go manage.
Oh my god, that's so dark.
But it has this kind of melancholy to it, and I agree with you.
The politics is kind of left out.
We get tactical discussions within the team about, you know, how do we beat this guy and how do we get the best results?
But we don't get people actually discussing the issues, which is why I think this is ultimately a film about process.
And the melancholy field that it has, I interpret it as being one of these people who is completely steeped in the idea of managerialism.
Process and lesser evilism and so on and politics as the art of the possible and all that sort of lovely stuff.
Feeling ultimately kind of sad about that.
Feeling like it's not really enough, is it?
It feels like sort of Blairite, post-Blairite melancholy to me.
Right.
Yeah, no, no, no, absolutely.
I mean, you know, you would know more about the UK politics than I would, obviously.
But no, no, no, I agree.
It does feel, I do agree that it is very much about process.
Even though it's like you've got to respect the process.
There are long sequences of this, and I think it's the strength of the film.
I enjoy the film, but there are long sequences that are just, you know, how do we vote?
How does this process happen?
The film is definitely, I think it looks askance at some of that.
It looks askance at, like, is the pomp and circumstance really necessary?
But then it also sort of appreciates that these characters who feel constrained by that are nonetheless They're undergoing that, you know, process.
They're undergoing all that because it's how they kind of build a stronger faith for themselves than for others.
It's like, you know, by engaging in this, you know, 2,000-year-old or, you know, nearly 2,000-year-old political process, you are part of this long chain and, like, the strength of the Catholic Church is bellied by or belied by the...
The strength of how much we can embrace those institutions, you know, and any kind of institutional move, any kind of change has to come in, you know, matters of degree rather than, like, clean breaks.
And, you know, and there are arguments.
There are, you know, we do get, like, kind of at least a couple of scenes of, you know, there hasn't been an Italian sitting on the throne for 70 years, etc.
You know, you do have, you know, the traditionalists making the argument that, like, you know, the church has lost its It's lost its way, etc.
And then you have the, you know, Stanley Cucci is like the crazy radical who's like, maybe it's okay if women can be priests.
Maybe we shouldn't push so hard on abortion.
Maybe we, you know, it's like very reasonable things, but within the context of like...
This guy might be Pope.
You'd be a radical Pope.
Of course, I'm amazed.
I want to know how he got 10 votes on the first vote to begin with.
These guys do not seem on board with that kind of shit, but it's the reality of the world we're given.
We don't get to question that.
Again, I'm just interested in more of the how exactly are these factions being divided again?
There's a lot that's left on the cutting room floor.
And when you compare, I mean, I think it is a relevant film in that it does lay out the content of the ongoing, the long ongoing debate within the Catholic Church, which is continue to modernize, continue to progress, continue to change to be more in touch with the modern world.
This is the way they put it, of course.
Or retrench and become more traditional.
I mean, these are the issues that are currently being decided in Conclave.
I mean, this is a very consequential conclave that's going on now.
It is going to have big effects.
And what they tend to do going by history is they tend to not go for the, they call them papabile, the guys that go in who participate, It's not like you put yourself forward or campaign or anything like that.
It's far too subtle and weird and wily for that.
But they tend not to choose the guys who are at the extremes.
They tend not, it seems anyway, they tend not to choose the raging liberal or the raging conservative.
They tend to go for compromise moderate candidates rather leaning, progressive...
The person who's going to fulfill the institution most centrally, basically.
Yeah, yeah.
And what often happens is that you get somebody...
There's a little bit of this with Pope Francis, that they turn out to be a bit more, quote-unquote, radical in the papacy than people would have expected.
I love that Francis is a radical because, like, why can't we just love people and not, like, beat down on immigrants and shit?
Also, he's from Latin America, the first pope from Latin America.
maybe he has opinions that are not like the same ones that like the Polish Pope or the literal Nazi youth Pope has about these sorts of issues.
Maybe there's a little bit of nuance here, but also like, you know, he had really terrible things to say about, you know, gay people and, uh, trans people, et cetera, et cetera, because, you know, it's like, you know, does a beer shit in the woods.
It's the Pope Catholic, I mean, yeah, he's the head of the Catholic Church.
Of course he's going to hate queer people.
That's just, you know, it's just a given.
Like, I don't know, like, it's just...
I don't take the Pope seriously, so I don't have to care, but it is one of those things.
It would be great if the Pope was like, yeah, please, fuck all you like, but you're not going to get Pope to say that.
The Pope does wield huge political influence across the globe.
Absolutely.
I think Pope Francis died, and people were coming out with their eulogies and their praise and so on, and people went a bit overboard, I think.
I mean, Pope Francis was.
He was a Pope.
I mean, come on.
I mean, even the best Pope, I mean, the best Pope of my lifetime was like three guys.
It's literally like, you know, John Paul II and then, you know, Nazi Pope.
What was his name?
Ratzinger.
Benedict XVI.
Benedict, yes.
I keep forgetting.
Sorry, again, I don't follow this stuff.
Like, I looked it up.
There are a little bit of three Popes in my lifetime.
So, you know, best of three.
Cute enough for me.
But I'm not going to sing his praise.
I'm not going to give him a homily.
I guess it depends on who the Pope we get next is.
If the next Pope continues in that tradition, I think we can look on it more kindly versus if they do a radical redirect, I guess.
But it has been overstated by both left and right.
But the Francis papacy has been, for the Catholic Church, progressive.
I mean, they have...
He started to talk about, well, maybe we can baptize trans people.
Maybe we can bless same-sex unions and stuff like that.
Maybe we shouldn't deport migrants to their deaths and so on and so forth.
And again, you know, it's not actually what we would call radical, but this has made a lot of people, especially in the American Catholic Church, Incredibly angry and hostile.
Oh yes, absolutely.
Which I think maybe we'll get to.
We'll get to, yeah.
No, I listen to a fair amount of Jack Sobiak these days, and he has one called Pope Francis a fake pope.
We've got a fake pope in charge.
One of the things I've discovered from looking at this slightly is that there are loads of right-wing conspiracy theories about the papacy.
There is a big...
Left-wing or pseudo-left-wing conspiracy theory about it, which has kind of died out a bit, which is the idea that John Paul I, who was elected Pope and then died almost immediately, that he was murdered because he was about to uncover the involvement of the mob and the P2 Freemasonry group in the Vatican Bank, and they link it up with Roberto Calvi, God's Banker, and all that stuff.
But there's loads of right-wing conspiracy theories about it.
I would say those go back to the John Birch Society, but those go back to the Klan.
Those go back centuries.
I was going to name-check the John Birch Society because that's kind of the first thing that came up.
And I'm like, no, the Klan.
Certainly the second Klan was horrifyingly anti-Catholic.
Absolutely.
Bigoted conspiracy theories about Catholics and the Catholic Church has been a staple of the American far-right, as you say.
But there is one that I particularly like, which goes back to, I think, the 1958 conclave, where they claim that it was rigged to cheat Cardinal Siri, who was the big arch-conservative, of his rightful win.
He actually won.
And they handed it instead to the guy that became John XXIII, who was actually mentioned in the movie Conclave.
They mentioned that his papal robes had to be expanded because he was so big.
And the thing about John XXIII, he's another one of those sort of moderate compromise candidates who turned out to be a little bit more radical than anybody was expecting.
He's the one that convened the Second Vatican Council, Vatican II, which is the huge ongoing controversy.
If you know anything about controversies in the Catholic Church of the 20th century, you know the Vatican II thing.
I remember reading even a reference to that, and that being like this giant, like, you know, this giant, like, jumping-off point for people in terms of, you know, like, again, fake Pope, fake Catholic, you know, not a real Catholic, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
So, yeah, no, totally doubt that.
And I think the other interesting thing about the movie is the twist ending, where the, I mean, it's not much of a twist.
The moment he walks on screen, I thought, oh, he'll be the Pope.
Well, I guess we should talk a little bit about the character a little bit, because I think this is an interesting element of the film.
It turns out there's a secret 110th Cardinal, 109th Cardinal, what is it?
But there's a secret Cardinal who is created in secret.
There's a Latin term for it.
I don't remember the Latin term for it, but he was created by the Pope in secret.
And he shows up with his papers and is like, I have every right to be here, et cetera, et cetera.
And Ralph Fiennes looks at it and is like, do you have any...
He asks the guys around him, do we have any reason to think this isn't valid?
And it's like, well, nobody really can say anything.
And so they invite him in and he comes in.
And I think he's the one character in the film who actually speaks Spanish on screen, which I think is an interesting kind of stylistic choice.
You hear a lot of Italian, you hear a lot of Latin, you hear a lot of English.
But only a little bit of Spanish.
And I think, if not all of it, overwhelmingly, it's all spoken by this one guy.
And it is, given the time and place in which the novel was written, it's very easy to think the first Latin American pope was also currently serving as pope at the time.
And this is sort of a metaphor for Francis being kind of a voice for change or a voice from a different part of the world.
And he's shown as being...
You know, he has ministered in war zones.
He's been to Sudan.
He's currently like the archbishop or the cardinal of whatever, of Kabul.
So he's like literally ministering in a little war zone.
And, you know, it's powerful stuff.
I mean, it works on the screen.
It works with the character.
I really enjoyed that element of it.
I've actually been in the shit, guys.
We don't really get to know him as a character so much.
He kind of shows up at the beginning, and then towards the end, he has kind of a great speech.
But I wish he was another kind of witness to the film.
I wish he was a bigger part of what we see.
Again, I wish we just saw more of the interpersonal relations, because he just kind of shows up, they let him in, and he becomes pelt with the evidence, basically.
Yes.
Yeah.
But the name is Benitez.
He's a Mexican.
And he's been almost, it's implied, secretly working with the previous pope, the dead pope.
They specifically name-check him as having worked as a missionary in Kabul, where he's currently the bishop of Kabul.
And, you know, tiny Catholic population in Afghanistan, but nevertheless, that's how they do it.
And also in Baghdad.
Yes.
As well as a couple of other places.
And that, I mean, those are specifically places that are linked in terms of recent history with the war on terror.
Absolutely.
Which links up with the sub-theme in the film about Islamic terrorism.
It's never actually completely confirmed within the film that the bombs that go off outside the Vatican and elsewhere are Islamic terrorist attacks.
But that's certainly what everybody inside assumes.
They just say bombing, and then everybody assumes this is an Islamic terror attack.
So you get the incredible racist rant from the arch-conservative or arch-traditionalist candidate, Tedesco, which is then gainsayed by the Benitez character.
And, I mean, what I was saying before about this coming from Robert Harris, who was sort of a Blairite, and I feel this film, and presumably the novel, It has this melancholy feeling of that kind of politics just not having worked, not having led to the right results.
And that feels like it links up to me.
And at the end of the day, the guy who is clearly supposed, he's chosen as the Pope, this dark horse candidate, and he's clearly, the film tells you, you know, morally, this is the correct choice.
Because he's this simple, direct, non-ideological man of faith.
But he's also, as I say, he's been on the ground dealing with the horrors of places that were attacked by the Blair government, along with the Bush government.
So it has that interesting feeling of regret about it, I think.
He's also, like, 40 years old, so that guy's going to serve as Pope for, like, 70 years or something.
Yeah, that's why they don't choose young men, because they don't want that.
And also, they don't choose guys that they don't know based on one pretty speech.
I mean, it really is.
I mean, it's a pretty story.
I'm going to defend it.
I mean, it's what William Goldman used to call Hollywood horseshit.
It's like 90%.
You write Hollywood horseshit.
You get the happy ending.
The guy gets the girl.
The bad guy's defeated, etc.
Everybody knows this is it.
Even in quote-unquote good movies, you get the Hollywood horseshit ending.
That's just what Hollywood produces.
This is Hollywood horseshit.
That's what it is, right?
I will defend it to a degree as, like, they have kind of taken down successively every other, like, viable candidate, you know?
It's like, you know, the Stanley Choochee character is too liberal.
It's a bit, and then there were none.
It's a bit last man standing.
It's a little bit like he gives a good speech and says, well, I guess he gets to be Pope now, as if there was no other candidate available, you know?
Like, I think at that point, you know, there is the question of, like, well, we don't have to choose from among the Cardinals.
Maybe there's a President of the United States who might be a good Pope, you know?
Yeah, who's as good as put his candidacy forward online.
Yeah, definitely.
I mean, you know, maybe that's the argument the Conclave is having now, is, you know, we've already got a guy who's used to living in a house of gold.
Maybe, maybe that's a, you know, I mean, hell, if it'll get him away from the presidency of the United States, I would actually support the idea, you know?
You can do less damage.
You can do less damage to this pope than is, like, in charge of the nuclear, you know, missile situation, you know?
He'd want to expect to do both, wouldn't he?
Yeah, no, you're right.
But no, maybe they're in Conclave now, looking at that AI picture that he posted on Truth Social, going, yeah, well, he does look good in the white outfit.
Yeah, he does.
He can wear a big hat.
Yeah, we love the big hat.
It's good, you know.
But yeah, no, and so Benitez gets, you know, he gets, like, majority elected as pope, and you just, like, hear him.
And then it turns out, I've got, I have, I'm a little bit androgynous.
He has a secret.
He's intersex.
It comes out that he's in some sense.
Sorry, I was using the wrong term, but you know what I mean.
Sorry, I was being jokey.
The film doesn't state in these terms, but he was born with both male and female organs.
He is intersex.
He found out when he was undergoing open-heart surgery or some kind of surgery, gallbladder surgery.
Appendectomy?
Yeah, appendectomy.
Yes, you're correct.
Yeah, he had a surgery and they found like, oh, you got ovaries in there, buddy.
And it's one of those things that, I mean, it happens.
And apparently, I think this is a thing that much more frequently than anybody on the right wants to admit.
And the Catholic Church hasn't dealt with this before and it is an accepted thing.
It's not a radical idea that a priest might have this happen to them sort of thing.
Although, finding out like, Your new Pope is, you know, secretly intersects might be, like, an issue for certain people.
I think we'll discuss that here in the future.
I do feel like it's, I don't know why it's in the movie, honestly.
I don't know why, I mean, apparently it is taken from the book from everything I understand.
I feel like, you know, we have a new Pope who's, you know, kind of the answer, like, you know, a reputation of the world on terror who is, as you say, who is going to come in, he's going to be a more, you know, empathic.
you know, Pope who knows the Horace war, Sarah, like we've got their happy ending and I don't know.
There's a suggestion that's like, well, this is the secret thing that's going to bring me down in the future.
We all have our secrets.
Even the African guy, Eddie Amy, despite the fact that he was 30 and the girl was 19, there's no indication that that was like a...
When I read the synopsis, I'm like, oh, this is going to be an abuse situation.
But obviously, You can talk about age gaps, et cetera, and power dynamics, et cetera, but every indication is, I mean, that was a consensual sexual encounter, right?
That takes it down as candidacy.
And just by definition, just by whispers, of course, you're never going to elect him because infidelity or whatever.
It's a scandal, isn't it?
Yeah, it's a scandal.
And of course, it's going to be a huge scandal.
I mean, it's hard for me to think like...
This isn't going to come out at some point.
It's not going to reflect badly, badly in terms of how the church is going to see badly.
I don't know.
It seems like a really...
I don't know.
It just seems like...
What's this doing there?
Look, if Robert Harris is trying to express solidarity with intersex people and broadly the transgender community or whatever, I'm in favor of that.
I feel like that's what he's doing.
But I feel like it kind of undercuts some of what we've done in the rest of the film.
One thing, if we found out about that earlier, like if Ralph Fiennes had found out about that earlier in the film, and if he was more of a character that you kind of got to know.
But again, it's just like, he's here at the beginning, he talks about his war-torn past, he gets elected Pope, and then, oh, it turns out I'm intersex.
And that's the end of the arc.
I don't know, it's one of the weaknesses of the film for me.
And of course, not that I mind that the new Pope is going to be intersex, it's just like, narratively, I just don't know what Yeah, when you get the scene where he's elected, and then you get the scene where Ralph Fiennes' character, his secretary or whatever, comes to him and says, oh, you've elected that guy.
I didn't think that would happen.
I've actually got some information about this guy, which makes that really difficult.
I was expecting it to be, I've discovered that this guy is not really a cardinal, he's a fantasist who's blagged his way in.
And honestly, that would be less of a problem than that he'd be intersex, because they are completely allowed to elect any fucking person in the world they want to elect.
You don't have to be a cardinal.
You don't even have to be a bishop, apparently.
You don't even have to be a priest.
I would imagine.
Could you be non-Catholic?
I think you have to be Catholic.
Apparently in the Middle Ages there was one guy, it might have been a bit earlier than the Middle Ages actually, there was a guy who was elected by acclamation because he was preaching and a dove landed on his head and everybody just said, oh it's a sign from God, make him the Pope.
Which didn't work out tremendously well for this guy because I can imagine.
Politics, he was torn to pieces a little while later.
Yeah, but yeah, they can basically elect anybody they want.
But yeah, that's what I was expecting.
And it turns out instead that we have this twist that the guy has a uterus that he could have had removed and the previous pope knew about it and he chose not to remove it.
And it's quite nicely done.
He says, you know, God made me this way and I don't think there's anything wrong with me and I decided not to.
And it's fine, but as you say, it does feel a bit...
I suppose it does kind of link up with some of the noises the movie makes about the attitudes of some of the cardinals about gay people.
It doesn't raise transgender issues, it just talks about gay people.
So it doesn't really connect.
I think the nearest thing that it connects to is the speech that the Lawrence character, who's the dean of the Vatican, so he's organizing it.
He gives a speech at the opening where he talks about...
He talks about certainty being the enemy of tolerance and the Pope should doubt and he should be able to sin and ask forgiveness and stuff like this.
And I suppose the idea is that they have a Pope now who does kind of fall between people's certainties and they should...
Well, I mean, it's got an open ending.
What is Lawrence going to do about this?
Is he going to cover it up?
Is he going to not cover it up?
Yeah.
I think they were going for something.
I don't think they quite got there.
But, yeah.
It's one of those things where I really would like to, like, it's one of those where I would suggest, like, I would like to read the book, except I'm not going to read the book.
I don't think it's interesting enough to go to the book, just to see what the intention was.
I might read the last, like, ten pages of the book and to see what it does with it.
But, yeah, no, it's, yeah, no, I don't know.
I don't mind it being there.
I think it's interesting, but it is one of those...
It is one of the things where I feel like the movie...
I like the movie.
I think it's a good movie.
I think it's worth watching.
Especially if you don't go into it as Oscar-caliber performance.
It's fun.
It's a nice little...
It's got some mystery elements.
It's got some whodunit elements.
It's got some politicking.
It's got Stanley Chuchi.
It's got lots of great stuff in it.
But it's undercooked.
There's some stuff...
It is a bit.
I do wish...
it leaned a little bit harder into the things I'm interested in and the things that I think the listeners to this podcast are largely interested in terms of like what we want stories to do, not to speak for the audience, of course, you know, but you know what I mean?
Yeah.
Yeah.
But there is a way to...
Yeah.
where the Benitez character is just not the simple, honest, faithful, good man that he's presenting himself as.
If you look at it, you just...
Twist it ever so slightly.
You could view that man as a supreme politician.
Absolutely.
He hides himself until he gets to do the good speech.
And now, absolute repression against homosexuals.
We're going full back Latin mass motherfucker.
That's where he's going to land.
Stone the gays.
He did hide stuff about himself.
Absolutely.
And I don't blame him for hiding that about himself in the context that he's in, facing that bigotry and suspicion and so on.
But he did.
And Lawrence is clearly a bit uneasy about this, despite having said earlier in the film that he wants there to be a pope who sins and then asks forgiveness and does better.
And there is a...
Yeah, as I say, they were going for something.
But it doesn't quite work.
But it doesn't ruin the movie in the process.
I mean, again, it's an enjoyable film.
Seven out of ten, eight out of ten, maybe?
Sorry, we don't give numbers to fellas, but in terms of my enjoyment of it, yeah, I like this.
It's two hours long and it didn't feel long.
It felt like fine.
I watched it later at night than I meant to.
I was like, oh, I'll watch an hour and then watch the next hour tomorrow.
I finished the whole movie.
It was a very decent watch.
I enjoyed the movie.
It's a fine movie.
No, I give this a solid 8 out of 10 on the popular movie scale.
Yeah, exactly.
No problem.
On the IDSG scale of, you know, like, you know, we're going to judge things by our standards.
It's a 1 out of 10. As every film is a 1 out of 10. That's right, yeah.
You can never like anything or you lose your cred.
Citizen shit!
Verti what?
Yes, exactly.
Yeah, so that's the movie.
I think you had prepared some other stuff about more broadly right-wing Catholic politics, and I don't know how much you want to get into, but I think we should cover that if you feel up to it.
Yeah, it does kind of connect with this film, because as I say, this film is up front.
It's not detailed or in-depth about it, but it is up front about the fact that this process, the choosing of the next pope, is a political battle, and you do definitely have a...
A quote-unquote left-wing and a right-wing in the Curia and in the Catholic Church.
And Bellini, Stanley's character, is an American liberal.
He is explicitly an American liberal.
I think he's Italian.
Yeah, per the Wikipedia page, he's American.
I read him in the film as an Italian, so maybe they swapped some of the nationalities.
It's possible.
I don't know.
I can check the novel, but maybe it's more clear in the...
But, like, the most liberal of the...
In the novel, he is Italian.
So, yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
I mean, that's how I read it.
But the most liberal of the Papa Bile this time around is an Italian.
Zupi, apparently.
He's considered the most liberal of the possibles.
So, he won't get it.
He also looks disturbingly like Sylvester McCoy.
So, I hope he gets it just on that level.
Just on that level.
Yeah.
But, yeah.
As I say, imperfectly, but it does talk about the politics of it.
And there is a lot of noise coming from the US Catholic right about this being a big, important, and of course everything's this sort of gutta damarung civilizational battle for these people.
The disturbing thing is that they're not even entirely wrong.
They're just, when they're right, they're right for the wrong reasons.
They are very invested in getting the Catholic Church and the papacy turned back to the right.
They hate the legacy of Pope Francis.
They hate what he did.
They consider him not a true Catholic.
I mean, you listen to the US, right?
And Pope Francis was a Marxist atheist that wanted to destroy the church.
I mean, they say this.
You have this journalist, Gareth Gore, who wrote a book called Opus, which is about Opus Dei, about the corruption and the dark money and the influence, the confluence of right-wing Catholics and the right-wing in America.
And as he says, they've spent years preparing for this moment.
They see this as their opportunity.
He talks about this thing called the Red Hats Report, and this involves Leonard Leo, who of course is connected to Opus Dei.
That's what Gore's book is about.
Tim Bush, who's an Opus Dei donor, loads of right-wing American Catholics involved in this, and the basic idea is to find and compile compromat on liberal possibilities, liberal progressive papabile.
And as Gore says, there's going to be dossiers being handed out in advance of the conclave to try to blacken the names of progressive candidates.
Bannon?
Steve Bannon is on the war room talking about how they need to rest the Catholic.
I mean, he's a Catholic.
He describes himself as a...
As a strong Catholic, despite being three times divorced, he's a traditionalist Catholic.
He's talking about the need to wrest the Catholic Church back to the right, back to the traditional ideas.
And this, I learn, is the term traditionalist Catholic.
Because I've been looking at the work of somebody, an author and journalist called Mary Jo McConaughey, who has written a book called Playing God, which is about the relationship between I mean,
she talks a little bit about the history of how the leadership of the Catholic Church in America, as distinct from the congregation, you know, the Catholic people, who traditionally have been...
Fairly progressive because they've been a minority, and a lot of them migrants as well, or immigrants, in a society run by wasps and evangelicals.
Because of that, they've traditionally been fairly keen on separation of church and state, blue-collar working-class Catholics, particularly in urban areas.
Tended to be in favor of stuff like civil rights and separation of church and state and stuff like that.
Yeah, it turns out when you're a victim of the broader culture, you actually support things like civil rights and separation of church and state.
Yeah.
At least for you, as opposed to, you know, when you get to be in church, yada, yada, yada.
Anyway, yeah.
Yeah.
But it was, I mean, the link between American Catholics and the Democratic Party was fairly strong.
But that's been sundered in recent years.
American Catholicism has moved right over the last few decades, particularly at the top.
And she talks about how the abortion issue, the abortion issue was kind of the wedge that was used to separate American Catholics from the Democratic Party.
And you have this guy, Paul Weyrich, or Paul Weyrich.
In the 80s, who went to full well, you know, the moral majority and all that, and said, look, we can unite around our common right-wing values.
You guys are mainly worried about segregation.
You're worried about black and white kids going to the same schools.
That's an unattractive issue.
That doesn't get people on your side.
We can use abortion to further our agenda.
And so there's been this alliance between right-wing traditionalist Catholics.
And the evangelical and Southern Baptist and so on right-wing in America, certainly on these cultural issues.
And in recent years, American Catholic bishops apparently have been coming.
I mean, McConaughey's work, I haven't read the book in full yet, but I've skimmed through it and I've read some articles and some interviews and things.
She talks about how loads of these bishops, these Catholic bishops in America, are totally in bed with, you know.
I mean, she goes into the links between this thing called the Napa Institute, which apparently was set up by an evangelical Christian and a Catholic.
And it's this right-wing group, you know, among this forest of right-wing groups that they have.
And they get loads of dark money.
They get money from the Koch Foundation, Charles Koch.
And there's this guy, Tim.
Bush, who's linked with Leonard Leo.
Of course, Leonard Leo is one of the—he's a Catholic, and he's one of the most influential and powerful extreme right-wingers in America today.
He's the guy behind reshaping the Supreme Court.
All six of the conservative justices on the Supreme Court were raised Catholics, and I think five of them still are practicing Catholics, which is unheard of in American history.
That many Catholics on the Supreme Court.
There are six Catholics on the Supreme Court.
Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, Barrett, and then Sotomayor.
Sotomayor, of course, being a wise Latina, grew up from a different strain of Catholicism, of course.
That's true.
Yeah, that's it.
Yeah.
But you, I mean, McConaughey goes into the links between Leonard Leo and the Thomases, Clarence and Ginny Thomas.
I mean, we know about those.
Clarence Thomas is an extreme right-winger.
Ginny Thomas is a complete lunatic conspiracy theorist, full-on Trumpist MAGA right-winger, involved tangentially in January the 6th.
Leonard Leo and the Thomases are the people behind John Eastman, who's the guy that came up with the Trump...
The first Trump administration's strategy for stealing the 2020 election with the false electors scheme, sending the votes back to the states, etc., etc.
You have this Bishop Strickland who was on this thing called the Jericho March, or I think the organization is called Jericho March, and they had this big demonstration and rally just before January the 6th.
He spoke at that.
It's full-on Trump.
It's full-on conspiracy theorists.
Stop the steal stuff.
He had basically all-out war with Pope Francis, criticized him on all these issues.
Climate change, as McConaughey says, these people are steeped in fossil fuel money.
Francis was outspoken about climate change, about the need to do something about it.
I'm not saying Francis was a perfect man.
He absolutely was not.
He got lots of things wrong.
Best book of our lifetime is a low bar.
We don't have to keep...
Bouncing on that, you know, beating on that drum, it's fine.
But that's it.
But he did believe in climate change.
Believing in climate change makes you a radical left-winger for the modern American right.
Exactly, exactly.
It's too much for Bishop Strickland.
And Francis actually dismissed him from his bishopric, or whatever you would say, on the grounds of mismanagement, I believe.
He sent people out to examine this guy's diocese, and he just said, you know, I mean, he was, frankly...
Francis was too indulgent and too patient for too long with several far-right American Catholic bishops who were mismanaging their diocese.
That's what it looks like to me.
But Strickland, who's far-right on all these issues, climate change, transgender, gay issues, all this stuff, ferociously critical of Pope Francis, fired by Pope Francis, he's now all over the airwaves saying, like, Bannon, we need to change course.
We need to get the church back going right.
So that's the state of play.
McConaughey also talks interestingly about how loads of the Catholic bishops in the States during COVID came out as anti-vax or saying, you know, you shouldn't have to, there should be religious exemptions and stuff like that.
Whereas Francis was saying, no, you should take the vaccine.
The vaccine is good.
If your local government says you can't have a government job without having had the vaccine.
Obey that.
Do as you're told.
This is a huge deal.
The vaccine is fine.
The vaccine is fine.
Guys, come on.
Please take the vaccine.
Science is actually good, says Pope Francis.
No, says the right-wing American Catholic bishops.
No, it's not.
And they see their moment.
Well, then again, let's not ask whether Francis accepted stem cell research.
Again, the candle worms we're not getting into, but you know.
It's all relative.
It's all relative.
Well, what I find fascinating about the, you know, and I agree, I have not read what you've read about this.
I didn't look into that stuff.
But what's interesting is the degree to which, you know, for a long time in American politics, there was a Protestant-Catholic divide, especially among the far right, you know.
And that is the Catholics tended to be, you know, like, they kind of, like, They, as you say, they were broadly, you know, they saw themselves as a discriminant against minority and, you know, opposed a lot of the activities of, like, so the John Burst Society and, you know, the other far further right groups, the George Wallace's of the world.
And those people got their power from the quote-unquote evangelical movement.
God, we really need to talk more about evangelical Christianity in this podcast.
I think that's something I'm just thinking about it now.
I'm like, yeah, this is something we have undercovered, you know, especially since our...
Just on the level of, you know, we're spending this episode picking on the Catholics, we need to spread it around a bit.
Yeah, no, no, we definitely, yeah.
I mean, you know, and I don't know, I don't think we're picking on the, I think we're picking on the church.
I'm joking, I'm joking.
Yeah, no, no, yeah.
But no, no, you know, by and large, the far right in the US came out of the, you know, the post-Confederacy Deep South.
Like, that's sort of the angle it comes from.
Not entirely, but by and large.
And it really was the abortion issue.
Like, you know, you know.
I think it's worth noting that the Southern Baptist Convention in 1972, when Roe v.
Wade was decided, had no official position.
There was no official position from the Southern Baptist Church that abortion was a sin.
You should prayerfully understand this as a personal choice, basically.
It is something that you decide for yourself in your circumstances.
We take no official position on it.
And then politically, they aligned with these sort of Catholic anti-abortion stuff in order to, due to the kind of oncoming Reagan administration influence and the moral majority and all that stuff that was gaining steam at the time, they gained political power out of it and then become a political powerhouse.
But I think there's also a cultural difference.
That is the evangelical movement, again, that post-Confederacy kind of right-wing Christian bullshit stuff.
It comes from the southern backwater.
This is a land of hillbillies.
This is a land of barefoot barbarians walking around in mud-stained blue jeans and going to work.
Whereas when you're talking about the diocese of New Jersey or whatever, these are wealthy people.
These are people who drive nice cars and who work in professional jobs because of the relative material conditions in Yeah, least, but you get the thing that I'm trying to say here.
You get the logic that I'm trying to draw, right?
And so there was one of the things that we see over the course of the last 40, 50 years is this kind of like, instead of it being an argument between Catholics and Protestants or between like Baptists and Catholics, et cetera, you see more and more a Even if we disagree religiously, even if we each think the other's going to hell, we can ally on these political goals, right?
And I think that's part of the process by which you get, you know, six of the nine justices on the Supreme Court are Catholics.
They're not Catholics because suddenly everybody started to love Catholicism.
They're Catholics because, you know, the wealthy people who go to Harvard and Yale who go on the path to become, you know, Supreme Court justices come from the wealthy Northeast.
And suddenly they had presidents that were largely elected from that evangelical subculture who were willing to accept that because they were acceptable candidates to the quote-unquote establishment.
So there's a really complicated sociopolitical material history there.
It has nothing to do with religion per se.
I mean, it does have to do with religion, but it has a lot to do with their allies of convenience.
And you do see, certainly on a lot of far-right figures, I mean, J.D. Vance did not grow up Catholic.
He converted to Catholicism.
Why did he convert to Catholicism?
I mean, honestly, I can't speak in his heart, and he doesn't address this in his book, so I can't, like, vote for the book or anything.
But, you know, I don't know.
It's not hard to see.
He's an up-and-comer.
He wants to be a power player, and the way you become a power player is, you know, you toady up to, like, the bigwigs in the Catholic Church who are going to, like, fund campaigns, who are going to fund political action committees.
And so, it's not like...
I became a Catholic because there was this little Catholic church down the street that really spoke to me.
It's like, no, I went to a big league law school and I converted to Catholicism because it's a way of furthering my political goals.
Ironically, a lot of the bullshit that right-wing shit had to say about the Jews is actually kind of true of the Catholics.
And of course, not like Catholics.
I think we need to kind of get back to that distinction you just made between the actual religion and the politics.
And I think what we're talking about here is not really religion in the sense of faith or theology or anything like that.
But we're talking about political cultures that dress themselves up in the aesthetics and the identities of different types of religion, be it Christianity or whatever.
I want to be clear, I'm not actually saying the Catholics are, you know, everything that the right-wing says about the Jews are actually true about the Catholics.
That was a broad joke.
I was just saying, like, you know, it's funny that, like, if six of the nine Supreme Court justices were Jewish, I would hear no fucking end to it.
The fact that one of them is Jewish is bad enough for these people.
Six of the nine are Catholic?
I mean, that's just like, you know...
Vance feuds with the Pope on...
Basically on Twitter, not quite, but almost.
He's having an argument on Twitter about, he says, in January this year, he says, oh, we're cutting government funds that go to Catholic charities, and they shouldn't complain.
And the only reason the bishops are complaining about that, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops said, hang on a minute, what are you doing?
And the only reason they're complaining about that is because they're lining their pockets, they're making money out of it, which is, you know, You're talking about charity donations.
Again, I'm not defending them, but they administer government money that they get granted to various charities.
I don't think bishops are getting rich on this charity money from the government.
But this is what Vance says.
And you also famously have Vance in an interview completely mangling the Catholic idea of love, saying it's the proper Christian thing to do is to...
Love your family and then your nation and so on and so forth.
And the evil left have perverted that by saying you should love everybody.
And the Pope chimed in very unusually to say, no, actually Jesus did say you should love everybody.
There's this little thing called the Parable of the Good Samaritan.
Don't know if you've heard of it.
A little known portion of the Bible.
A little known obscure story.
A little obscure story buried somewhere in the end.
But all this happens.
Literally, like, the first thing you learn about Christianity if you know nothing about Christianity.
Buried somewhere in the Apocrypha.
But no, my point is, all this happens, right?
And then Vance goes to visit the Pope, and the Pope dies immediately afterwards.
If you flip the politics, so right becomes left and left becomes right, they'd be convinced that he'd murdered him.
I know we said he murdered him, but we were joking.
Just imagine if Kamala Harris had visited the Pope, if it is Pope Benedict.
Like, imagine that the roles reversed.
Like, she had gotten in an argument with Pope Benedict.
Like, obviously the history doesn't work here, but, you know, you get it.
Like, the right-wing Pope.
And then, like, a day later, the Pope dies.
You would never hear the end of it.
There would be, like, Kamala killed the Pope would be just a stalking horse talking point for the rest of time.
Like, I would never personally live to see the end of it.
It would just be a thing that people actually believe that she either was so toxic in person that she killed him or that she actually poisoned him.
It's, yeah, no, no question.
It was her cooties poisoned him.
Al Gore meets the Pope and suddenly, you know, he mentions climate change and the Pope just dies.
He just like, you know, he just kills over.
He goes like the Nosferatu.
And then, you know.
But no, to wrestle us back to the point, I mean, you were talking, and I was just emphasizing the distinction that you made.
I wasn't correcting you.
You made this distinction between the politics and the religion.
And yeah, I mean, Vance and other people on the American far right today, Candace Owens is another example.
They convert to this very...
Again, I don't believe she grew up Catholic.
I think she converted.
No, no, no.
Did she grow up Catholic?
She did not.
She converted to Catholic.
Okay.
Rubio, I don't know what Rubio was born into, but he's been back and forth.
He was a Mormon for a while, and I think he was an evangelical, and he's a Catholic again at the moment.
But they are converting to this particular type of traditionalist.
This is what McConaughey calls it, traditionalist Catholic, by which she means basically far right.
They're converting to this because it's a politics.
It's a way of organizing and identifying.
A particular type of right-wing politics.
Yeah, absolutely.
Interestingly, like the super-fro, right, they typically do not go Catholic.
They go some sort of nationalist orthodox, either Greek or Russian orthodox, typically Russian orthodox these days.
But they grew up Protestant, they grew up in their Southern Baptist church, and then converted because of the structures, because of the patterns, because it's seen as more high church, it's seen as more demanding, it's seen as more...
And therefore, more regimented and therefore more fascist.
It's a very aesthetic choice for, I think, a lot of these people, for sure.
There's so much we can say about this.
Sorry, I did not read the writer you've read.
Now I really want to dig into that.
And now I really want to dig into the evangelical side of this and talk about how abortion was passed and all that sort of thing.
Because we could talk a lot about how the George W. Bush presidency was just infested by these.
Evangelical conservative right-wing dipshits back in the day, and how that's just been kind of forgotten.
Remember when we thought Ashcroft having the nude statues in the Capitol covered up?
Remember, we thought that was as wacky as it could possibly get.
Oh my god, we were babies.
We were children.
It gets so much worse, it always gets worse on this podcast.
That's just how it goes.
That's how you know.
That's our unofficial motto.
It always gets worse.
It really always gets worse.
Until it gets better.
It will get better.
We're working for it to get better.
That's the point.
But yeah, no.
Conclave.
Good movie.
Definitely.
You know, if what we said sounds interesting, we spoiled it for you.
But really, there's...
I mean, it was going to be spoiled for you regardless.
But yeah, check it out.
It's good.
And Catholicism?
Yeah, it's kind of so so.
Mixed on that one.
Mixed on that one.
I'm not going to say join the Catholic Church, but if you feel moved to do so, I'm not going to argue with you.
The right-wing political project, wholly against, by the way.
That's the thing we're wholly against, whatever flavor it comes in.
So, you know, that's our political project.
Yeah.
So, as I say, we give Conclave like 8 out of 10. We give the Catholic Church, well, Catholicism in general, shall we say, like a 5 out of 10 could go either way.
The Catholic Church, a much lower number, which we will not.
And then the right-wing political project, like a negative 10 out of 10. Minus 712, yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
Really, really sophisticated stuff you're getting from us this week.
Absolutely, yeah.
But thanks for listening anyway.
We will be back with you quite soon.
We have another bonus episode in the pipeline.
It's taking a long time and that's entirely my fault, but we have another bonus episode where we have an interesting guest to talk about an interesting movie.
Can we reveal the movie?
We can.
We talked about Dirty Harry, finally, and that's an interesting conversation.
I'm looking forward to that one coming out.
I've been teasing it for a while.
I've got the episode about Megyn Kelly, which We will record in the next week or two.
Now that this one's coming out, we got another bonus coming out.
I don't feel quite so obligated to get it out right away, but it'll come out soon.
We'll record it soon anyway.
And we're going to do the 2019 movie Bombshell, or probably the 2021 movie Bombshell.
No, 2019, 2019.
Movie Bombshell as well.
So if you want to read ahead or watch ahead of us doing that bonus content, because the movie will be under the bonus content, watch Bombshell and give one or both of us a dollar a month, and then you will get to listen to that episode.
so yeah.
*music*
God, who would be the really funny, like, Pope that we would recommend, like, you know?
Orson Welles.
No, he can't be Pope.
He's dead.
For this podcast, God, who would be the Pope?
I mean, could it be anybody?
I think the whole logic of this podcast is, like, no Popes, no masters in a way, you know?
There is a thing of, like, you know, actually, maybe, like, there just shouldn't be a Pope, you know?
Oh, I mean, obviously, if that's an option.
Right, if that's an option, like...
Maybe there shouldn't be a Catholic Church.
Maybe there shouldn't be a Pope.
Yeah, no, certainly.
It's hard to like one person to lead the Catholic Church.
That's kind of perfect, because that's kind of how I feel about what that movie is saying.
It just has this feeling of kind of weary disillusion about the whole idea of structure and institution and process.
But at the end of the day...
What can you do but work within it?
For all that it just constantly fails and constantly traps you, you have to continue to try to work within it and come to the best result you can.
That's kind of what that film means, I think.
More imaginatively, no, burn it all down.
I mean, not literally.
If this gets used...
I'm not exhorting our listeners to literally burn down the Vatican.
Honestly, I'm not.
Oh my god, if anybody puts one piece of paper or flame anywhere in Vatican City, we're going to get blamed for it now.
Off to El Salvador for the both of us.
Well, at least for me, you're not within the realm of the US government.
