Maybe that’s precisely why I was so drawn to Conclave, Edward Berger’s thriller/mystery about the selection of a new pope. The film, based on the 2016 novel by Robert Harris, is littered with priests behaving badly and Isabella Rossellini doing her best to disapprove of absolutely everyone, but as far as we know, none of their various indiscretions involve the harming of minors. (Well, to be fair, there is one subplot involving Nigeria’s Cardinal Adeyemi engaging in an illicit affair with a nun from his home country, but there’s no specific reason to believe said nun was underage at the time.) Mostly, these potential popes’ less-than-good deeds can be boiled down to two words: “vaping” and “gossip,” both things I L-O-V-E!
