Megyn Kelly is impressive when you consider that she’s been able to create an entire career just from being mad at stuff. She is like the Rumplestiltskin of irritation — turning cranky thoughts into gold — or a blond Andy Rooney with consequences. From the idea of Santa Claus being Black to fighting with Jane Fonda for the right to ask a woman about her plastic surgery, the archives are stuffed with the things that Kelly does not enjoy. (She did, however, like Real Housewife Luann de Lesseps’s Diana Ross blackface costume enough to defend it on air.)
Conclave, the Golden Globe-winning drama about the election of a new pope, just happens to be the latest thing Kelly hates.
“Just made the huge mistake of watching the much-celebrated Conclave & it is the most disgusting anti-Catholic film I have seen in a long time. Shame on Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci & John Lithgow for starring in it & shame on director Edward Berger (among others),” Kelly wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, making sure to get the full names of the biggest actors in the movie.
Conclave has been one of the bigger indie hits of the holiday season, bringing in $69 million worldwide on a reported $20 million budget, winning best screenplay at the Golden Globes, and featuring prominently in Oscar discussion. But the rollicking thriller — which focuses on the machinations of Cardinals gathered in Rome to pick a new pope — is stirring up controversy with the group of people most likely to be interested in the inner workings of the church: Catholics, like Kelly. Or, at least, some Catholics.
Why Megyn Kelly is mad at Conclave
There is a lot to unpack about Conclave. From political infighting among an international coterie of bishops, to nosy clerical gossiping, to Isabella Rossellini as a nun with ulterior motives, to car bombs, the movie — based on an airport novel of the same name by Robert Harris — is arguably overwrought and overstuffed, if endlessly fun.
However, it’s the “twist” ending that Kelly seems to have a real issue with (and more on this, with spoilers, in just a moment). And, as Kelly cited, the film is being recognized on the awards circuit and may be one of the Best Picture nominees come Oscar time.
Here’s Kelly’s full rant:
Spoiler: They make THE POPE INTERSEX! This is the big exciting twist at the end. I wish I had known so I wouldn’t have watched it. There are almost no redeeming characters in the movie — every cardinal is morally bankrupt/repulsive. The only exception of course is the intersex pope (who – surprise! – has female reproductive parts) & the cardinal who keeps her secret – bc of course that kind of Catholic secret-keeping must be lionized. I’m disgusted. What a thing to release to streaming just in time for Christmas. They would never do this to Muslims, but Christians/Catholics are always fair game to mock/belittle/smear.
Though Kelly phrases her tweet in tabloid fashion and uses capitalization to drum up the alarm, Conclave is not exactly a traditional trans narrative, although it would be impossible not to read it as political.
What Kelly is referring to when she writes that “they make THE POPE INTERSEX” is the final act of the movie, in which newly confirmed Pope Innocent, formerly known as Cardinal Benitez (Carlos Diehz), reveals to the film’s protagonist, Fiennes’s Cardinal Lawrence, that he was born intersex, but only discovered his female internal sexual organs as an adult. Benitez had — with assistance from the late prior Pope — considered a laparoscopic hysterectomy to remove his uterus and ovaries. The reveal is surprising and, ideologically, something of a curveball.
In her tweet, Kelly misgenders Benitez, who identifies as male in the movie.
Benitez explains that his faith and respect to God helped him decide not to have the surgery that would affirm his masculinity: “I am what God made me. And perhaps it is my difference that will make me useful.”
This is the point that’s angered Kelly: The Catholic Church does not allow women to hold higher positions of power, which the final twist reveals to be the ultimate concern of Conclave. Benitez’s intersex identity and positioning as one of the film’s morally good characters not only opens a conversation about tolerance but also questions the rules set in place against women in the Church and the Church’s governing of women’s bodies.
Being born intersex is no sin, but as Benitez explains, despite his unaltered exterior appearance, “my chromosomes would commonly define me as being a woman.”
Having female anatomy disqualifies him not only from being pope, but from becoming a priest at all. If his fellow cardinals knew his secret, they would be very unlikely to agree that there’s value in Benitez’s particular difference. And if they were allowed to have social media, perhaps some of the conservative wing would even tweet in the same incensed fashion as Kelly.
Lawrence understands this better than anyone. As the dean of cardinals, it’s his duty to make sure that the next pope will be a good leader, someone who will symbolize the Catholic faith. He knows that if Benitez’s secret gets out, it would not only threaten his papacy, but that the resulting fight would likely be a detriment to Catholicism at large.
Yet, when he presses Benitez about who else knows and when he hears Benitez’s answer about his faith and relationship with God, Lawrence finds peace. Safe in the belief that the new pope was chosen by God, Lawrence confirms Benitez’s election.
Is Conclave really anti-Catholic?
After winning the Golden Globe for Best Screenplay this week, Conclave writer Peter Straughan was asked about Kelly’s tirade. He explained that he hadn’t read her critique in full, but was told that she deemed his movie anti-Catholic and disrespectful.
“I don’t think the film is anti-Catholic. I was brought up Catholic. I was an altar boy,” Straughan told Variety.
Straughan explained that he wrote a script that showed the struggle between the Catholic faith and the very powerful men in charge of sculpting what said faith is supposed to look like. Their aspirations for goodness, their ambition, and their inevitable fallibility are all parts of their humanity. These stewards are not perfect, but they’ve been ordained to spread a divine message.
“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,” Straughan said. “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.”
Kelly bashed Straughan’s explanation on her site, writing: “I have a very high threshold for offense. It is really hard to offend me. I guess I didn’t feel deeply offended by this, but I was unsettled by what I saw. And I was pissed.”
Kelly isn’t the only Catholic who’s taken umbrage with the movie and or found its ending salacious. Prior to the movie’s release, it was already buried by some Catholic critics because of the original book. “Given what we know about Conclave from the fawning critics, the novel, and what people associated with the film have said, Conclave is more a piece of anti-Catholic propaganda than it is a work of art,” reads a report from a Catholic League critic who did not see the movie. The Catholic League is known for calling out and encouraging the boycott of movies — famously Dogma, The Golden Compass, and now Conclave — it deems anti-Catholic, as well as studios like Fox and Disney.
Yet the clash between Catholic ideals and the messier reality of the humans who make up the church that Straughan gets at isn’t a particularly new or novel idea.
For the last two decades, a massive sex abuse scandal and the administrative effort to cover it up has been the dominant narrative about the Catholic Church. In Pope Francis’s various apologies to survivors (who have criticized him for not taking more accountability), he has spoken about the need to examine the “atrocities” of those in power and mistakes the Church has made, as well as the Church’s responsibility to its victims.
Essentially: In order to move forward, the Church has to acknowledge that, sometimes, the people given the most power by the Church have abused it.
While Kelly isn’t entirely wrong about Conclave’s plot — over the course of the voting, various members of the clergy are revealed to be engaged in bribery, smear campaigns, and inappropriate sexual relationships, while others are simply ambitious or politically minded — Kelly’s conflation of depicting fictional cardinals’ corruption with “mocking/smearing/belittling” reflects a lack of media comprehension. (Setting aside the fact that there are a number of redeeming characters, including Cardinals Lawrence and Bellini, played by Stanley Tucci, who simply don’t share Kelly’s conservative values.)
Depicting a cardinal as corrupt or interested in power isn’t automatically a smear. The reality that Catholic leadership is made up of human beings, with all their faults and wants, striving for something higher, is part of what makes it beautiful and, ideally, transcendent. Further, the film shows the conclave explicitly voting against the various “morally bankrupt” cardinals when they’re made aware of the transgressions — a sign that this governing body doesn’t stand for corruption.
What Kelly seems to want is something resembling a Catholic version of a Marvel superhero flick, or propaganda where priests are unquestionably good. One could make the compelling argument that the latter mentality is part of how clerical sexual abuse became an insidious, systemic problem. Questioning the tenets of the faith is, as the movie demonstrates, the only way to keep that faith strong.
Megyn Kelly and Conclave can both be pro-Catholic, even if they disagree
The divide between Kelly and Straughan, two people raised in Catholic homes, comes down to opposing views of what Catholicism is supposed to be.
Back in March 2024, Kelly wrote about her own relationship with Catholicism, specifically her struggles during the process of annulling her first marriage. In her crisis of faith, she writes, she experimented with going to an Episcopalian mass, but disliked it immensely, stating that she’s drawn to rigidity: “I realized there is a reason I’m generally drawn more to the faith that with which I was raised, where there are these strict rules that sometimes feel weird and intrusive, but they resonate with me.”
Kelly wants rules and absolutism. Conclave touts the beauty of uncertainty and doubt.
As dramatic and campy as Conclave gets — at one point, conservative Cardinal Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto) hits his vape with true artistry — it always comes back to the idea that Catholicism is a constantly evolving and immensely personal, living thing. It’s about all these bishops, with their different backgrounds and ethnicities, different experiences and ideas about their religion, coming together and uniting because of a common faith. Their fidelity to God transcends boundaries that would normally keep everyone apart. Conclave sees the beauty in those differences and how Catholicism persists, as flawed as its stewards may be.
“Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand-in-hand with doubt,” Cardinal Lawrence says in his sermon addressing his fellow cardinals. “If there was only certainty, and if there was no doubt, there would be no mystery, and therefore no need for faith.”
Catholicism, like any religion, is open for interpretation.
Four men wrote the gospels, and each one focuses on different aspects of Jesus’s life. People reading (usually priests) or listening (usually laypeople) to the gospels walk away with their own interpretations of the symbolism and take it into their own lives. No one Catholic person’s idea of spiritual identity is identical to another’s. But each individual idea, especially when aired out on a sizable platform, like Kelly has and as Straughan has with Conclave, may and often tell us more about the person, their priorities, their values, and their hypocrisies more than it ultimately defines Catholicism itself.
