I am not Catholic, but no fewer than six people texted me after the death of Pope Francis to ask me a question about the conclave to elect his successor. Even though I’ve done graduate work in organized religion, they often wanted to know answers to things I could not tell them. Who’s the frontrunner? How long will it take to make a selection? Few people would have considered Robert Francis Prevost a frontrunner, and even fewer would have guessed that it would be such a brief conclave. Even Francis was not elected so quickly.
After all, the Catholic church, which has been around for thousands of years and will be around for thousands more, does things on its own timeframe and with its own rules, few of which take American notions of oughtness into consideration. I told them the same basic facts: The Cardinals gather in the Sistine Chapel, totally sequestered from the outside world, and cast ballots until a two-thirds majority is reached.
And yet, even if the conclave does happen in sequestration, it does not happen in a vacuum. Surely, as these men in red converged on Rome from all over the world, they read the news on their iPhones and questioned Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s belief that the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice.
The headlines from the last week alone should have been enough to give them pause. Netanyahu plans to seize the Gaza strip in its entirety; a Venezuelan jockey urged his horse Sovereignty across the finish line even as the Trump administration deported his countrymen by the planeful; conflict resumed between India and Pakistan, following decades of wars and skirmishes since 1947; the Mississippi Supreme Court has scheduled the execution of a 78 year-old man on death row.
Even if the cardinals were asked to forget about the outside world as the white smoke of their decision curled over the roofs of the smallest city-state, the outside world crouched at its window with its suffering and with its delusions of grandeur. Trump tweeted an image of himself in papal vestments mere days after the homeless led the late Pope Francis’s funeral procession to Santa Maria Maggiore.
Edward Berger understood the weight of such a decision when he directed the Oscar-nominated and BAFTA-winning 2024 film “Conclave” (which, full disclosure, I’ve watched no fewer than five times since it came out last fall). Ralph Fiennes plays Thomas Lawrence, the dean of the College of Cardinals who must preside over the conclave. In his charge to his brother cardinals as they begin the voting process, Lawrence does not dismiss the heaviness of their choice but instead leans into it, saying, “If there was only certainty and no doubt, there would be no mystery, and therefore, no need for faith. Let us pray that God will grant us a Pope who doubts.”
Perhaps it is the ramifications of certainty that we see play out when we read the news: the certainty that a country must be first and best, the certainty that any who come seeking care and asylum are not worthy of it, the certainty that any human being could ever really decide—with any sense of justice—who lives and who dies.
The cardinals’ choice, then, was the same as ours. More important than a single vote about a man who will wear white for a time, their task and ours is a daily decision to refuse to ignore the suffering of our neighbors—and about the ways that we will combat that suffering and the ways that we will refuse to bow the knee to dreams of grandeur that ultimately come to nothing.
After all, Pope Francis, who led a congregation of over a billion people globally, is now entombed in a simple white grave that bears only his name. His care for the suffering and his belief that all people should be in the business of building bridges rather than walls, however, will long outlive him—and perhaps will live on in Leo XIV and in us, no matter our religious belief.
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