The new movie “Conclave,” faithfully adapted from Robert Harris’s 2016 novel, tells the story of a vexed papal election by depicting the Vatican of melodramatic legend: dark corridors, footfalls, sotto-voce conversations; locked rooms, hidden documents, scheming, sabotage; clerics in deftly tailored vestments swishing across marble floors and red carpets. When an English cardinal, Thomas Lawrence, played by Ralph Fiennes, says, “I think we’ve had enough secrets,” it’s clear that the disclosure of fresh secrets is soon to come.
The Vatican’s Synod on Synodality, whose second Rome session concluded at the end of last month, was strikingly prosaic by contrast. This October, as last October, about three hundred and fifty voting delegates met for several hours six days a week, seated at round tables in the bright modern audience hall adjacent to St. Peter’s Basilica, to discuss “which processes” can help the Catholic Church “to live communion, to achieve participation, to open Herself to mission.” The delegates—about eighty per cent of them chosen by local church bodies, and twenty per cent by Francis himself—included roughly sixty cardinals (about half the number of voting members in the College of Cardinals), along with priests, nuns, bishops, and laypeople. Pope Francis himself attended most days. The discussions at each table followed a set format (brief comments by each speaker, followed by silent prayer) and were punctuated by intervals in which delegates described the work of “study groups” devoted to specific issues: the Church’s approach to poor people and to other religions, its missionary work, its digital presence. There were press briefings, but the proceedings were hardly newsworthy: for one thing, the agenda was shorn of controversial issues (such as the prospect of ordaining women); for another, delegates were asked to limit their comments about the daily sessions. Beyond a final report, approved a paragraph at a time by the voting delegates and then ratified by Francis, what was said at the synod was largely meant to stay at the synod.
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With thanks to The New Yorker and Paul Elie, where this article originally appeared.
