Conclave made waves during 2025’s awards season, thanks to its Oscar nominations and its 2025 Best Adapted Screenplay win, but the movie is finding new context now that we have a new Pope for the first time since Pope Francis Ascended to the position in 2013. But since his death in April 2025, many people have wondered: What does it take to become a pope? And what exactly is a conclave? And how will this change the world?

While the film Conclave might only give us a tiny taste of the weight of this historic moment in time, it gives us plenty to chew on when it comes to faith, the state of humanity, and how the Church plays a part in all of it.

1.

“Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand-in-hand with doubt. If there was only certainty and no doubt, there would be no mystery. And therefore no need for faith. Let us pray that God will grant us a Pope who doubts. And let him grant us a Pope who sins and asks for forgiveness and who carries on.”

– Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes)

2.

“The church is not the past. It is what we do next.”

– Benitez (Carlos Diehz)

3.

“Ambition the moth of holiness.”

– Bellini (Stanley Tucci)

4.

Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. Even Christ was not certain at the end. ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ he cried out in his agony at the ninth hour on the cross. Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand-in-hand with doubt. If there was only certainty and no doubt, there would be no mystery, and therefore, no need for faith.”

— Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes)

5.

“I am what God made me. And perhaps it is my difference that will make me more useful.”

– Benitez (Carlos Diehz)

6.

“The point is we will never find that a candidate who doesn’t have any kind of black mark against them. We’re mortal men. We serve an ideal. We cannot always be ideal.”

— Wozniak (Jacek Koman)

7.

“When you say we have to fight, what is it you think we are fighting? You think it’s those deluded men who have carried out these terrible acts today? No, my brother. The thing you’re fighting is here, inside each and every one of us, if we give in to hate now, if we speak of ‘sides’ instead of speaking for every man and woman.”

– Benitez (Carlos Diehz)

8.

“God loves each of us as if there were only one of us.”

— Cardinal Tremblay (John Lithgow)