Why we care about the conclave

In the last week of April, millions of mourners gathered in Rome to honor the passing of Pope Francis after his controversial 12-year pontificate. Today, a much smaller but more significant gathering will begin: a conclave of 133 cardinals to select the next head of the Roman Catholic Church, and as Catholics believe, the vicar of Christ on earth. Given what’s at stake—supreme doctrinal, pastoral, and indeed juridical authority over the world’s 1.4 billion Roman Catholics, and substantial moral authority over world leaders—every conclave is a major global event, but this year’s is likely to draw even more attention than usual.

Part of that is merely a matter of pop culture, given the success of last year’s Oscar-winning film, Conclave, which masterfully depicts the arcane procedures governing this greatest of all elections, as well as the ugly all-too-human politics bubbling just underneath the pious ceremony. (It also ended with a completely implausible pope.) But this just raises the question of why such a film generated so much buzz, and why are our imaginations captivated by red-hatted men muttering Latin in shuttered chapels? For evangelical Protestants in particular, the interest is striking. Our parents’ generation paid little attention to the internal affairs of the Roman Catholic Church, but today, many evangelical publications speculate on the leading papal candidates.

This fascination with papal politics stems at least in part from the same sources that have driven a steady stream of conversions to Catholicism among evangelical elites in recent decades: continuity, certainty, and ceremony.

In a world where accelerating technological change seems to be rendering every product, process, or idea obsolete before it has even become familiar, the Catholic Church promises continuity—an unbroken succession of leaders stretching back to St. Peter himself, with doctrines and traditions handed down by the very apostles. For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, the dizzying pace of cultural change seemed exhilarating, and Rome’s stubbornness in the face of modernity condemned it to irrelevance. Today, however, the relentless reinvention of everything, from our consumer technologies to our central institutions, has left many of us exhausted, and Catholicism’s conservative bug increasingly looks like a feature.

In a world of crippling information overload, warring pundits, and reality warping algorithms, the Catholic Church claims certainty. Again, the optimistic promises of the 20th century have rung increasingly hollow in recent decades, leaving many of us desperate for an alternative. First we were told that science would unlock the secrets of the universe and replace speculation and superstition with hard facts, but it seemed to simply breed more disputes among academic specialists. Then we were told that the internet would democratize knowledge by putting all the information in the world at our fingertips. But as our minds remain stubbornly finite and prone to bias, we find ourselves instead dragged blindly along a disinformation superhighway. With its authoritative body of teaching and at least theoretical capacity to issue infallible judgments, Roman Catholicism has never seemed more alluring.

In a world of crass commercialism and cultural sameness, the Catholic Church offers spectacle and ceremony—nowhere more so than in a papal conclave. Even in the early decades of modern democratic capitalism, conservative critics lamented its glorification of mediocrity, and the suffocating sameness of products designed for a mass market. Once again, the internet was meant to provide an antidote, unleashing individual creativity and aesthetic achievement. But whereas we crave a beauty that would draw us out of ourselves, digital culture simply reflects us back to ourselves. The jarring otherness of Catholic ceremony, especially as glimpsed in throwbacks like the Latin Mass, seems to promise a path of transcendence.

And yet, as Protestants, we remain convinced that impressive as these achievements of the Roman Catholic Church have been, they are largely illusory. The apparent stability of formal Catholic dogma conceals dramatic shifts in direction and even outright contradictions; indeed, to the Protestant Reformers, Rome’s greatest fault was its spirit of innovation, manufacturing new doctrines not found in Scripture. The apparent certainty of Catholic teaching melts away on closer inspection. In reality, every papal encyclical or pastoral letter, like every human text, contains a hundred ambiguities and provokes fierce interpretive disagreements between progressives and conservatives. And even the richness of Catholic ceremony, while admirable, should be treated with caution, since Scripture repeatedly warns us against the ways lavish outward ceremony can mask empty and lifeless souls.

That said, while mindful of the persistent flaws within the Roman Catholic Church, we should use its strengths as a spur to get our own house in order. Protestants must rediscover within our own traditions strong historical anchors in the midst of liquid modernity, robust intellectual toolkits for making sense of uncertainty, and resources for worshipping in the beauty of holiness. The sad reality is that if most Protestants are more likely to eagerly follow the Roman conclave than their own denominational synods, it is because our institutions have bred few leaders of stature to match those gathering this week in the Vatican—and that is cause for mourning indeed.