In December, Megyn Kelly called “Conclave” the “most disgusting, anti-Catholic film [she had] seen in a long time,” and in January — as the movie was gaining awards-season momentum — she doubled down. “It was an attempt to embarrass and humiliate Catholics,” she said.
I quite liked “Conclave,” and really loathe this sort of Catholic criticism. Here’s why:
First, consider the poetry of Thomas Aquinas. He was both a watertight systematic theologian and a great wordsmith. Megyn Kelly would have no objection to “Tantum ergo.”
Then, consider Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales.” While also an unimpeachable poet, Chaucer — unlike Aquinas — was no scholastic. He didn’t hesitate to write about priests behaving badly. Are the “Canterbury Tales” disgusting and anti-Catholic, then? Do they represent an attempt to embarrass and humiliate Catholics? Obviously not. Chaucer was just as much interested in tender piety and religious contemplation as he was in satirizing corrupt friars and licentious clerics.
“Conclave” is no “Canterbury Tales,” of course. Still, it’s like the “Canterbury Tales” in that it too depicts both good priests and bad priests, both the church living virtuously and the church acting wickedly.
There’s no denying that the Church, despite being more splendid than not, indeed falters on occasion. An honest account of Catholicism will leave room for this fact.
If Megyn Kelly wants to watch a morality play about the good Church triumphing unconditionally over worldly evil, then let her. (There’s a new “God’s Not Dead” movie, I hear.) It’s the censure of any depiction of Catholicism with more depth than propaganda to which I object.
What annoys me about the film criticism of the Christian right is much the same thing that annoyed me about the peak of liberal criticism in the late 2010s and early 2020s: the complete lack of interpretive charity. This mode of engaging with art willfully misinterprets its subject, always opting for the least charitable reading imaginable.
In the case of “Conclave,” that means ignoring the reverence director Edward Berger pays Catholic ritual and dismissing the care screenwriter Peter Straughan takes wrestling with faith, hope, love and duty. It means laser-focusing on the hot-button themes and assuming the basest possible motives for their inclusion in the picture.
In a way, Megyn Kelly and other Catholic critics with Mother Angelica–type sensibilities are the last bastion of Brechtian thought in America. With them, art is never considered as art but always as dialectic. They can’t let a movie be a movie — it’s never a matter of plot and character and atmosphere and only ever a matter of agenda.
That’s a puritan way of thinking, and aren’t we Catholics? Ours is the faith of risqué mystery plays and polyphonic music so intricate it provoked theological scandal and sumptuous Italian frescoes — not of Cotton Mather!
While I find this approach to art unbecoming, I can’t say it’s entirely unwarranted. There are movies that are disgusting and anti-Catholic; sometimes our culture does attempt to embarrass and humiliate Catholics. I only wish Catholic critics were better at figuring out which movies those were and inflicted less collateral damage in the course of their crusade.
There’s a culture war on, I’m told. I reckon the knights fighting on its front lines will lose unless they do something about their tin ears for art.
