Cardinals (Roman Catholic Prelates)

Subterms

    Latest story

    175 Shares169 Views

    ‘Conclave’: A Fly on the Wall Inside the Secret Process to Elect a Pope

    by

    A new drama by Edward Berger draws the audience inside this largely hidden tradition. How accurate is it?When a pope dies, cardinals younger than 80 gather at the Vatican to elect his successor in what is known as a conclave. Recent papal elections have offered glimpses of this highly secretive process by allowing television cameras to capture some of the pomp and prayers leading up to the voting.But the world is left hanging the moment a Vatican official solemnly proclaims, “Extra omnes,” Latin for “all out,” and shoos everyone else from the Sistine Chapel before dramatically shutting its immense wooden doors so that the cardinals can begin selecting the next pope.Edward Berger’s new drama, “Conclave,” which opens Friday, catapults audiences back inside the Sistine Chapel for a cinematically rare, if fictionalized, peek at the confidential electoral proceedings of the Roman Catholic Church.“Ancient rituals clashing with modernity,” Berger said, describing the film in a video interview.The film stars Ralph Fiennes as Lawrence, dean of the College of Cardinals, who in the film is responsible for leading the papal election, and Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Lucian Msamati and Sergio Castellitto as papal contenders. They are not based on real people but are instead amalgams of contrasting blocs within the church, traditionalist and progressive, that loosely define existing currents. “It’s all politics in the end,” said Robert Harris, who wrote the 2016 novel on which Peter Straughan based his screenplay.“Conclave” is hardly the first film to involve a papal election, and church-based mystery-thrillers, like Dan Brown’s “Angels & Demons” or Raymond Khoury’s “The Last Templar,” have regularly made best-seller lists.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    More stories

    • 75 Shares149 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Rebel Hearts’ Review: Sisters Act Up

      by

      This flashy, feel-good documentary follows a group of progressive Catholic nuns in 1960s Los Angeles.Few institutions notoriously resist change like the Roman Catholic Church, which to this day upholds rules of celibacy and continues to forbid the ordination of women. So for some, it may be surprising to learn that the church’s iron-fisted rule has long been met with resistance.Such a struggle is captured in “Rebel Hearts,” Pedro Kos’s feel-good documentary about a particularly gutsy group of nuns who took inspiration from the social upheavals of the 1960s to fight against exploitation by their male superiors.Combining archival footage with paper doll-esque animation and a flurry of talking-head interviews gathered over two decades by Shawnee Isaac-Smith, one of the film’s producers, this documentary traces the controversies and trailblazing feats of the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart, whose social activism and participation in civil rights and workers protests upended notions of the fragile, cloistered nun.Led by Anita Caspary, these women — and the liberal college they ran in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles — were considered dangerous by Catholic hard-liners like Cardinal James Francis McIntyre, the entrepreneurial head of the Los Angeles Archdiocese who the documentary claims staffed his many religious schools with unpaid, unqualified young nuns. Caspary and her unruly flock (including the pop artist Corita Kent, whose screen prints and drawings were often the cause of scandal) collectively sought autonomy — voting, for instance, to rescind the habit requirement.An unrelenting pop music soundtrack vests the story with a cheesy rah-rah sensibility, while the film’s breakneck pacing hinders proper reflection of any single event or anecdote. The onslaught of information certainly impresses by illuminating a rich and not-often-discussed slice of feminist history, but the execution is distractingly flashy and gratingly unfocused.Rebel HeartsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters. More