How the film sheds light on the secretive way popes are chosen

The 2024 film conclave, a box office success and Oscar winner, tells the story of a papal choice in which there are no obvious favorites. For many people, it was a look at the rarefied world of the Vatican, and the highly secret process of choosing a leader for the novel Catholic Church.

On Wednesday, May 7, life follows fiction when 134 Cardinals begin the process of choosing a successor of Pope Francis. As the film’s spectators will know, the papal conclave will take place completely to the closed doors of the Sistine Chapel, under their fames of fame of Michelangelo of world fame.

No one out of the confines of the Vatican will know the result until a white smoke plume is curly of its fireplace, which means that the Roman Catholic Church has a new leader.

But what does the film tell us about how the conclave can be developed and why do people find the process so fascinating?

Adapted from Robert Harris’s best -selling novel, the conclave shows the isolated cardinal voters within the limits of the Vatican for the doors of the election process.

They are not allowed to communicate with anyone outside the conclave: Malgh given the practical aspects, they are not completely cut.

“Everyone need to feed, they were not totally sealing the world,” says Stephen Bullivant, professor of theology and sociology of religion at St Mary University, Twickenham.

This self -imposed isolation is a tradition that dates back to hundreds of years.

In part, it aims to prevent voters from being influenced by external factors, although the idea of ​​a process that occurs behind closed doors may seem to disagree with the “transparency approach, visibility and scrutiny” of the modern world, according to Anna Rowlands, professor of Catholic social thought at the University of Durham.

The entertainment film an “incredible and introspective atmosphere” and the sense of withdrawal from the world, she says. “I fight to think about a more intense responsibility and feeling than being locked in the conclave.”

On the screen, claustrophobic and intense deliberations, strategic accessories and tactical movements abound. A Cardinal Socava in a favorite to improve his own possibilities. Others with unlikely perspectives urge their followers to change their vote.

This conflict of interests and competition ideologies provides much of the drama of the films. “Essentially it is the political machinations that continue,” said Nick Emerson, editor of the film, BBC earlier this year.

While some cardinals will think that the most important part is to follow the divine orientation, others will have anxiety to make a quick decision, says Tina Beattie, professor emeritus or Catholic studies at Roston University.

Since Pope Francis’s health had been poor for a while, it is likely that, just before the conclave, “he will have a lot of police and thrust for Allamy’s position behind the scene,” he adds.

“There will be all those who come on and [the cardinals] He won every one of one mind. “

Althegh in the film, some of the most tense scenes focus on the act of voting, in fact, much of the drama can arrive in the days of the days before the official borders of the conclave.

Duration this time, participants will be “to know how to meet, resolve what are the priorities and learn to work together as an organism so that they can come with a unified decision,” says Professor Rowlands, who is the end of a tweare.

In the film, an unknown cardinal, secretly designated by the late Pope, is catapulted in the fray.

In real life, this would not be possible. All the Roman Catholic man baptized is theoretically eligible to be made of the Pope, all the cardinals who vote in the conclave must have been publicly appointed by a previous Pope.

That said, the imminent choice can be one of the most unpredictable. About 80% of the eligible cardinals to vote have designated in the last 12 years by Pope Francis. He consciously chose people from all over the world and with various political origins.

Many of Francis’s named are from the developing world: “places and contexts that are not normal given a red hat,” says Professor Rowlands.

This adds a level of uncertainty in terms of its priorities and the final decision.

The film presents the cardinals as fallible human beings that make fun of power.

The director Edward Berger told the BBC last year that, although the conclave was considered “an ancient spiritual ritual,” they wanted to take the participants “to modernity.”

“We put them in this pedestal, and when you look more closely, they will have cell phones, they will smoke, they have the same problems, vices and secrets as us.”

Professor Rowlands says that the film provides a peak behind a process, with all the elements of human nature and human life in it: “loss. Duel, ambition, fear, temptation, courage.”

She adds: “It is something very, very human, a conclave … It has a divine purpose, but it is something very human.”