Next week, after Francis’s funeral, the College of Cardinals will assemble in Rome to choose the man who will lead their Church through these increasingly troubled times. That gathering has become more familiar to a wider, non-Catholic public thanks to the recent films Conclave and The Two Popes – though these are far from the first time that novels and the silver screen have made a drama out of a conclave.
This assembly is unlikely to echo the fiction of Robert Harris’s thriller and its screen version starring Ralph Fiennes. The next pope is almost certain to be a liberal in the mould of Francis himself, whereas in Conclave (spoiler alert if you haven’t read the novel or seen the film) an intersex dark horse cardinal absurdly emerges from nowhere through the deadlocked conclave to take the papal mitre.
Conclave followed hard on the red-slippered heels of The Two Popes in 2019, which told the ‘trueish’ story of Francis’s emergence as the first non-European pope in centuries, succeeding the conservative Pope Benedict after his sudden resignation.
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