Oops, All Popes! Conclave (Edward Berger, 2024)

Hi again! I'm going to share my religious trauma, caused by the sin of Papistry, but first, book announcements.

Be Not Afraid, my new horror comic series about, uh, religious trauma, is coming out in June. Please pre-order it at your comic shop. Also coming in June: I wrote a story about the gender identity of Wonder Woman villain Blue Snowman for DC Pride.

My non-fiction book DILF: Did I Leave Feminism is due out in October. You can pre-order that everywhere, but the way to support your local bookshop is Bookshop.org.

Finally, before you proceed, a confession: This post discusses (and therefore spoils) the final twist of the fairly twisty movie Conclave.

I posted and deleted a half-dozen additions to the Pope Discourse the day we got a new one. He’s the first American Pope; his papal name is the jazzy-sounding Leo; he’s from Chicago, and beat out a Cardinal whose last name is Pizzaballa; all ample fodder for comedy, to be sure. I was raised in the Church, and felt in on the joke, and it’s nice to be part of something. 

But I can’t laugh for long, when I’m talking about the Catholic thing, and I can’t trust myself to be reasonable about it, either. Mixed in with all the jokes were sincere-sounding expressions of admiration for Pope Leo, and for the Church itself: Laura Loomer called him a Marxist. He’s tweeted four-count-em-four negative remarks about the Trump administration. He represents a “commitment to social justice.” 

He is accused of mishandling multiple direct reports of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy under his command, including one incident where — after thirteen separate reports that a priest named James Ray was abusing children — Sassy Leo, the Deep Dish Pope, moved the guy next to a Catholic elementary school without notifying any teachers. In another incident, the principal of a Catholic high school, a priest named Robert McGrath, was molesting a student, and reportedly keeping child pornography on his phone. Leo kept him installed as principal, and McGrath’s name was never included on a list of predators later published by the province. In 2023, the church wound up making a $2 million payout to McGrath’s victim, Robert Krankvich. Robert Krankvich died two weeks ago, from complications of post-traumatic stress, at age 43. 

So there’s the rape — you’ve always got to lead with the rape, when you talk about the Papacy — but it doesn’t stop there. Leo also, like all Popes past and present and probably future, believes homosexuality to be an abomination in the eyes of God, and blames pop culture for creating “sympathy” for the “homosexual lifestyle.” In his most recent post in Peru, he publicly protested a plan to teach children about gender in school, saying “the promotion of gender ideology is confusing, because it seeks to create genders that don’t exist.” Unless he hops right in on the first day and starts demanding female ordination and free abortions for all, we can guess where he stands on women’s humanity and bodily autonomy. 

You cannot imagine how fucking shitty it makes me feel to watch people going on about “social  justice” under these conditions. I mean: Social justice for who? Not for me; not for anyone like me; not for the people I care about; not for survivors of rape and abuse, not for eleven-year-olds who need abortions because their fathers or teachers or priests raped them, and not for any woman, not anywhere, not ever. According to the current Pope discourse, you can be a good pope, a cool pope, a woke pope, without accepting that rape is wrong, that queer people deserve to live, or that women are human. That hurts. 

And, yes, it hurts me — a trans guy, a queer guy, a guy who was quasi-abducted by my youth group counselor when I was eleven (although, given how minor that last one is on the grand scale of terrible things done to children by Church members, it hardly qualifies) — but I am hardly the only person in my family to rack up trauma from the Church. Women used as brood mares, pumping out ten or more children under conditions of dire poverty, until their minds gave out or their teeth fell out of their heads due to lack of calcium — that didn’t happen in the middle ages. It happened to my fucking grandmother, in the 1960s. My departed father was a bad guy, in most respects, but he never spoke of the Church with anything but bitterness, and — not coincidentally — he had a raving, constant terror of “pedophiles,” to the point that he wouldn’t let me wander out of his sight in a public park. I look at the context he grew up in, and I get a pretty clear idea of how that might have happened. I am not saying anything happened to him — I cannot know what happened — but he grew up in an environment where worshiping God meant living with that fear.

Beyond me, beyond my family, there is the wreck of history: Countries colonized, people enslaved, genocides enacted, heretics tortured and hung and burned, all in the name of this one organization. The new Pope doesn’t like Trump, and he’s right to dislike him — Donald Trump has inflicted tremendous suffering — but I need you to hear this: If you held a contest for the highest body count, or the most global suffering inflicted, between Trump and the Catholic Church, the Church would win in a landslide. It wouldn’t even be close. This is an institution that has shed oceans full of blood to propagate itself and maintain its power, over the centuries, and every time they elect a new leader, we go, oh, maybe this one’s good. 

He isn’t. He won’t be. The Catholic church is a patriarchy — in fact, it is patriarchy; its missionaries exported and violently enforced the Western gender binary that determined what patriarchy would look like in much of the world — and as such, it is inimical to women, and queer people, and children. The Catholic church is also an organization whose power is explicitly based on existing outside of history. Its central claim is that its traditions perfectly represent the will of God, and it has handed down those specific traditions through millennia without meaningfully altering them. As such, its enmity to women, to children, and to queer people can never change. 

Which brings us — because this is still a movie newsletter! — to Conclave. It’s a movie that is supposed to make me feel better about all this; it takes on all these issues, directly or indirectly, and it makes a lot of the right noises. But it also makes the hurt worse. It’s one more story that looks around and goes, hey, maybe the next one, and ignores all the factors making that impossible. You cannot pitch improvement to an organization whose tagline is The Catholic Church: We Never Need Improvement. In conditions inimical to goodness, no-one can be good.