Warning: This article contains spoilers.

(ANALYSIS) Quite a lot of Oscar-nominated movies this year seem to be embroiled in controversy — from “The Brutalist” and its use of AI to the “Emilia Pérez” star’s old tweets (leaving aside the fact that almost everyone seems to agree the movie is terrible) to the failure of “Anora” to employ an intimacy coordinator on set.

But easily the biggest religious controversy is with the movie “Conclave.” The film, based on the best-selling novel by Robert Harris and starring Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, Isabella Rossellini and John Lithgow, follows a cardinal named Lawrence (Fiennes) who’s been tasked with running the selection of a new pope when the old one dies.

Ultimately, Lawrence’s faith is challenged when he uncovers secrets, scandal and corruption at the Vatican that surround what becomes clear is a tooth-and-claw fight for the papacy.

Now, anything involving religion and having the visibility of an Oscar movie is going to be controversial. But “Conclave” took itself a step further than most and, in doing so, has illuminated a lot of what is driving the religious divide in America today. 

The film is set up as a battle between liberal Catholic cardinals trying to stop conservative cardinals like Cardinal Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto) from ascending to the papacy and taking the church “back to the stone age.” In that fight, Cardinal Lawrence discovers that many on his own side have been engaged in shady dealings to gain power, which he has to stop. At the end of the film, after they’ve managed to select a pope who keeps Tedesco out of power. But Lawrence discovers the new pope is intersex. It’s a fact that disturbs him, but decides to keep the secret.

This plot prompted conservative Catholics (and some non-Catholics alike) to blast the film. Bishop Robert Barron, who has a popular online ministry and YouTube channel, suggested people “run away from it as fast as you can.”

The movie, he said, portrays “[Catholic] conservatives are xenophobic extremists and the liberals are self-important schemers. None can escape this irredeemable situation. … The only way forward is the embrace of the progressive buzz words of diversity, inclusion, indifference to doctrine, and the ultimate solution is a virtue-signaling cardinal who takes the papal name of Innocent and who is a biological female.” 

Non-Catholic conservatives, like Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro, who is Jewish, agreed: “This is in fact a propaganda piece about the evils of the Catholic church in the guise of a movie that is supposedly about the wonders of the Catholic church. … What this movie is actually about, is how the traditional Catholic church is evil, and how the church needs to become a progressive bastion.”

Radio host Megan Kelly posting on X, got arguably the biggest buzz (with coverage from outlets like “Variety”), calling it “the most disgusting anti-Catholic film I have seen in a long time.”

The film’s writer Peter Straughan has denied anti-Catholicism in the film.

“I don’t think the film is anti-Catholic,” he said. “I was brought up Catholic. I was an altar boy. I think the core message of ‘Conclave’ is about the church always having to re-find its spiritual core because it deals so much with power. That’s always been a careful, difficult balance. To me, that was a very central Catholic ideal that I was brought up with. I stand by it.”

On the one hand, Straughan has a point: There’s lots of love for many aspects of Catholicism in “Conclave” (one major reason I made it one of my top faith-based films of 2024). The movie spends much time honoring and glorifying belief in God and specific Catholic expressions of faith. Everything from the gorgeous architecture to the uniforms to the rituals and sacraments is treated with reverence and awe. Cardinals express their love for and commitment to God with sincerity, and those who use him cynically are portrayed as straying from the faith. I’m Protestant, but it honesty helped me see a lot of the appeal of Catholicism and the grandeur of the Vatican.

What the movie is against is conservative Catholics. Cardinal Tedesco is Coclave’s conservative reactionary boogieman who “wants to take the church back to the stone age” because he believes in things like the Latin Mass, is anti-mass Muslim immigration and in favor of traditional church views of homosexuality and women’s roles. All the heroes are the liberal Catholics fighting him and those who side with him. One could therefore reasonably argue then that the movie isn’t anti-Catholic — it’s still pro-liberal Catholic.

But it’s not that simple. Many of the things that the film refers to as conservative or reactionary Catholic teachings are just, you know, Catholic teachings, like the priesthood being exclusive to men. You can be a liberal Protestant while being in favor of women’s ordination because you can be a part of a Christian denomination that affirms that. Or you can simply say that your official church doctrines are wrong because Protestants don’t have any doctrines of infallibility around official church teachings. But Catholics do. So setting up a “spiritual core” of Catholicism contrary to its dogma is a pretty tough circle to square. How is that different from just being a Protestant? 

The “spiritual core” of the religious left is very often liberal politics rather than the Bible or church doctrine. As sociologist George Yancey pointed out in his book “One Faith No More,” the Mainline and progressive Christian denominations in America are much more likely to pick their friends based on politics rather than religion, and determine their religious beliefs based on their political ones than conservative Christians are. As an example, he references a progressive meme that portrayed Jesus saying to a conservative Christian: “The difference between me and you is you use Scripture to determine what love means and I use love to determine what Scripture means.”

In “Conclave,” rediscovering their spiritual core always involves conforming to progressive political priorities, whether on gender, sexuality or multiculturalism. The film builds its emotional stakes on the assumption that the conservative Catholics are the bad guys and need to be stopped.

Liberal Catholics are bad, for example, when they violate their principles to stop this threat, but conservative Catholics are bad when they live up to theirs and create the threat. And the church is finally saved from them when a pope is elected whose sex violates the church’s traditional teaching on sex and morals.

The irony is that the kind of faith the film celebrates is mostly only held by people in Western countries in denominations that are dying. The majority church of the Global South (where the church) is growing, largely holds to traditional views on issues that “Conclave” deplores. As Bible scholar Preston Sprinkle pointed out in his review of “The Widening of God’s Mercy,” this makes the unchecked moral superiority of films like this “profoundly ethnocentric.”

Even in America, among Protestants and Catholics alike, church attendees are becoming more conservative. This will likely only increase since conservatives are increasingly the only people having children. Indeed, demography in the West is a major part of this story.

If history is written by whoever’s left to write it, then the people writing the history books will likely one day determine that “Conclave” is anti-Catholic after all. 

Joseph Holmes is an award-nominated filmmaker and culture critic living in New York City. He is co-host of the podcast “The Overthinkers” and its companion website theoverthinkersjournal.world, where he discusses art, culture and faith with his fellow overthinkers. His other work and contact info can be found at his website josephholmesstudios.com.