Summary: The film “Conclave,” based on Robert Harris’ novel, explores a contentious papal election filled with intrigue and challenges to traditional Church authority. It culminates in the election of an intersexed Cardinal Benitez, symbolizing a break from rigid gender norms in the Church. This shift sparks outrage among conservative Catholics, highlighting the need for reform and a new direction for the Roman Catholic Church.
We are mortal men. We serve an ideal; we cannot always be ideal (View Highlight)
God could, after all, have created a single archetype to serve Him. Instead, he created what a naturalist might call a whole ecosystem of mystics and dreamers and practical builders with different strengths and impulses, and from these he fashioned the body of Christ […] Let me tell you that the one sin I have come to fear more than any other is certainty. Certainty is the great enemy of tolerance […] Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt. If there was only certainty, and if there was no doubt, there would be no mystery, and therefore no need for faith. (View Highlight)
When doctrines and norms get set in stone, any deviation from them is viewed as a “relativistic” threat to the established order and must be quashed. (View Highlight)
Rigidity and authoritarism guard against both novelty from within and criticism from without, while at the same time encouraging competition for power among the institution’s leadership. (View Highlight)
What the Church badly needs is a more balanced—a more scriptural—approach that values men and women equally so that masculine impersonal order-and-obedience tendencies are modulated by narrative-empathic feminine ones.9 Both are necessary for the creative spirit to flourish. (View Highlight)