The Election and Its Secrets
The Man Running the Election Cannot Escape Its Politics
Cardinal Jacopo Lomeli must organise the election of a pope while struggling to trust his own place in the Church. The task requires discretion, procedural authority and an appearance of neutrality. Robert Harris’s 2016 novel Conclave makes each of those qualities difficult to preserve once competing candidates begin revealing what they want, what they fear and what they have concealed. Behind the closed doors of the Vatican, a religious responsibility becomes an investigation into the people seeking its highest office. Lomeli wants the process to produce a worthy leader, but deciding who is worthy requires choices that can alter the result. The novel’s suspense grows from that entanglement, before its ending asks whether every secret should be treated in the same way.
A Death Leaves Lomeli With an Unwanted Responsibility
The pope dies, and Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, must oversee the conclave that will choose his successor. He approaches the responsibility with private uncertainty. His own confidence has weakened, and an earlier wish to resign has not released him from service.
The death creates both an institutional vacancy and a personal absence. Lomeli can no longer ask the pope to clarify decisions made in his final days. Other people now supply accounts of those decisions, each with different access, motives and degrees of certainty.
This makes the dead pope an active force in the novel without turning him into a character who can settle its disputes. His appointments, conversations and records influence the election. Their meaning must be reconstructed by people whose interests may be affected by what they discover.
Lomeli’s administrative position is equally double-edged. It gives him responsibility for the process and access to information, but it does not place him outside the institution’s rivalries. He knows the candidates, holds opinions about them and has preferences he cannot simply switch off.
Harris’s close attention to Lomeli’s thoughts makes that lack of detachment a source of suspense. An apparently procedural decision can also be a moral choice or an expression of ambition. The reader must consider how he understands his own actions without assuming that self-examination makes him immune to self-interest.
The official clothing and ritual contrast with his unease. In the authorised extract, his preparations involve physical discomfort, fatigue and an awareness of performing a role he does not feel equal to. The ceremony supplies continuity at the very moment its central organiser feels internally unsettled.
That contrast gives the novel a human scale. The future of a global institution is being shaped by people who still have bodies, habits, friendships and fears. Spiritual significance does not remove those conditions; it makes their influence harder to acknowledge.
The Candidates Represent More Than Personal Ambition
Four figures initially dominate the contest. Aldo Bellini represents a liberal direction that Lomeli broadly supports. Goffredo Tedesco argues for a forceful return to traditional positions. Joshua Adeyemi carries the possibility of a historic change in the geographical and racial identity of the papacy, while Joseph Tremblay presents himself as a capable alternative able to gather support.
These are not interchangeable contestants seeking a ceremonial prize. Each potential election implies decisions about the Church’s future, and that gives even reluctant political bargaining a serious justification. A cardinal may support someone imperfect because he fears what another candidate would do.
The difficulty is that justification can expand indefinitely. If preventing the worst outcome becomes the overriding aim, almost any compromise can be described as necessary. Conclave gradually tests where prudence ends and participation in corruption begins.
Bellini is particularly important to that test because Lomeli starts with sympathy towards him. Their shared outlook makes Bellini’s judgement easier to accept. Harris places the strongest pressure on that comfortable alignment, asking what happens when an ally recommends something the protagonist would condemn in an opponent.
Tedesco’s certainty creates a different problem. He offers clarity in a setting where uncertainty is exhausting. A firm answer can become attractive because it relieves the burden of continuing to weigh competing responsibilities.
Adeyemi’s candidacy shows why a change in representation does not automatically settle every question about policy or personal conduct. The possibility of a first Black pope carries historical significance within the novel, but Lomeli must still consider the specific person seeking the office.
Tremblay’s appeal is bound up with viability. He can become the candidate around whom people gather because their preferred option cannot win. That position makes the demand to examine his past inconvenient precisely when it may be most necessary.
A Late Arrival Complicates the Expected Contest
Vincent Benítez arrives shortly before the cardinals are secluded. In the novel, he is a Filipino archbishop serving in Baghdad, elevated to cardinal in secret by the late pope. His unexpected appearance requires Lomeli to establish that he belongs within the election.
Benítez has not emerged through the familiar sequence of public positioning and private anticipation. Other cardinals have spent time imagining which of the known contenders can win. He enters from beyond that settled map of the contest.
His outsider status should not be confused with innocence established merely by obscurity. Lomeli still has to check the basis of his participation. The novel gives him a legitimate role through the late pope’s appointment, rather than suggesting that unfamiliarity itself qualifies someone for authority.
The secret appointment also introduces a distinction the ending will return to. Concealment can protect a person or a mission, as well as disguise wrongdoing. The presence of information that was not publicly known does not tell Lomeli what moral judgement to make about it.
Benítez’s experience differs from that of people whose daily work is concentrated around the Vatican. His ministry in a setting affected by war gives him a perspective on institutional arguments that can otherwise become self-contained. Later, that experience will matter more than his familiarity with the election’s factions.
For now, his arrival expands the field without immediately replacing the established candidates. Harris allows the expected political contest to proceed, so that Benítez’s significance develops through choices and speech rather than being announced as the inevitable solution.
The enclosed setting strengthens that distinction by making information travel unevenly. A private conversation can change one elector’s understanding long before the same fact reaches the room. Lomeli’s procedural role gives him unusual access, but access creates obligations rather than immunity from error. He must decide when a discovery is sufficiently established to affect other people’s votes, knowing that delay can itself alter the election. That is why the investigation cannot be separated from the contest it investigates. Even an attempt to restore fairness becomes an intervention in the distribution of knowledge. Harris gives the reader a similar disadvantage: we can assess candidates only through what Lomeli has learned so far. Later revelations do not simply add colourful secrets; they force a reassessment of earlier judgements made under apparently reasonable conditions. The novel’s closed doors therefore generate an ethical problem as well as an effective suspense mechanism.
The First Ballots Turn Conviction Into Arithmetic
Lomeli’s opening homily asks for a leader capable of tolerance and doubt. He intends to address a spiritual need, but listeners can hear the intervention as an indication of political preference or even personal candidacy. A speech about the qualities of leadership cannot remain separate from an election choosing a leader.
The ballots then expose the difference between admiration and support. Private confidence about a candidate’s strength must confront numbers. As votes move, cardinals are forced to decide whether loyalty to a preferred person is still useful or whether a different alliance is becoming necessary.
This procedure gives the thriller its rhythm. Each count produces new information without resolving the contest. The same people return to the next ballot with altered expectations, and conversations between votes become attempts to interpret and influence what the numbers mean.
The secrecy of individual voting also preserves uncertainty. A public statement does not guarantee a corresponding choice on the paper. Lomeli has to manage a process whose formal clarity coexists with limited knowledge of what each participant is actually doing.
His homily becomes increasingly uncomfortable in that environment. Doubt may be a virtue, but the election still requires a decision. The novel does not suggest that uncertainty can replace judgement. It asks whether judgement can remain open to correction without becoming paralysed.
That question gives the procedural scenes more than decorative religious interest. Counting votes establishes an outcome; it cannot establish that the reasons behind every vote are sound. The process needs integrity from the people using it, while offering no simple instrument for measuring that integrity.
Adeyemi’s Past Enters the Dining Room
An encounter involving Adeyemi and Sister Shanumi exposes a history that damages his candidacy. Lomeli learns that they had a sexual relationship years earlier and that it produced a child. The disclosure is especially consequential because it intersects with responsibilities and vows that the candidate is expected to uphold.
The information does not arrive as an orderly public report. It emerges through distress, recognition and private conversation. Lomeli must respond while respecting the constraints surrounding what he has been told and considering what the electors need to know.
Harris makes the circumstances of the revelation part of the investigation. Why has this particular nun arrived in Rome at this particular moment? The truth of the underlying history does not establish that its discovery was accidental.
That distinction prevents the scandal from functioning as a simple act of purification. Removing an unsuitable candidate can benefit someone who engineered the exposure for self-interested reasons. A genuine wrong can be revealed through another person’s manipulation.
Shanumi also brings into view the people whose labour supports the conclave without giving them an equivalent role in deciding its outcome. The election depends on an environment maintained by women whose experiences can be treated as peripheral until they disrupt the men’s plans.
Lomeli’s attention to the transfer leads towards Tremblay. The request that brought Shanumi into the conclave’s orbit originated with him, although he offers an explanation involving the late pope. Once again, a dead man’s authority becomes available to support a claim that cannot be checked by asking him directly.
The practical question changes. Lomeli is no longer assessing only the conduct of one candidate. He is investigating whether another has used knowledge of that conduct to arrange the election in his favour.
Tremblay’s Records Force a Choice Between Allies and Principles
Allegations that the late pope had demanded Tremblay’s resignation remain unresolved. Seeking evidence, Lomeli enters the sealed papal rooms and finds financial records indicating that Tremblay has made payments to cardinals. The material points towards buying support in the election.
This is the breakthrough that gives suspicion documentary weight. Lomeli moves from an account of a conversation to records that can be examined and shared. The evidence changes what he can responsibly ask the other cardinals to believe.
It also creates a problem for him. Obtaining the material has required breaching a protected space, so his opponent can challenge his conduct as well as the accusation. The investigation does not place Lomeli in a position of effortless procedural purity.
Bellini urges accommodation because Tremblay may still be the best way to prevent Tedesco’s victory. His reasoning is politically intelligible and morally corrosive. It asks Lomeli to accept a compromised process in order to obtain a preferable result.
The disagreement tests their friendship more severely than a dispute with an obvious rival would. Lomeli cannot preserve his own standards merely by identifying the wrongdoing of people he dislikes. He must refuse an argument offered by someone whose wider objectives he shares.
Distributing the records damages Tremblay’s candidacy and changes the contest again. The act is necessary to the election’s integrity, but it also improves Lomeli’s own prospects. That coincidence does not prove selfish intent; it prevents him from claiming that doing the right thing has left him untouched by political advantage.
Conclave’s most persuasive account of ambition lies in that entanglement. Lomeli can be sincere, conscientious and capable of imagining himself as the solution. The danger is not restricted to people who openly announce that they want power.
Violence Outside Changes the Argument Inside
As Lomeli becomes a serious candidate, an attack outside the Vatican interrupts the conclave. The wider violence reaches the protected election space and changes the urgency of the discussion. The cardinals cannot continue pretending that their choice concerns only internal management.
Tedesco responds with hostility towards Islam and a call for confrontation. His rhetoric offers a forceful interpretation of fear, turning the attack into evidence for the combative direction he already favours.
Benítez answers from his experience of war. He rejects the idea that violence should be met by an equivalent appetite for violence. His intervention demonstrates a kind of authority that the earlier manoeuvring had struggled to reveal: the ability to speak to suffering without immediately converting it into permission for retaliation.
The contrast matters because both men respond to the same event. The attack does not dictate one inevitable political conclusion. Their different reactions expose what each brings to crisis and what kind of leadership he would offer afterwards.
For Lomeli, this is also a correction to the increasingly plausible belief that he must be the person who prevents the worst result. Benítez supplies another possibility. Accepting it requires him to relinquish the moral story through which his own candidacy has begun to seem necessary.
The novel makes that relinquishment part of his development. A person can oppose ambition in principle and still become attached to the idea that only his own authority can protect others. Recognising someone else’s suitability is a more demanding test than merely insisting that one never wanted the office.
What Happens at the End of Conclave?
Benítez is elected pope and takes the name Innocent XIV. Before the result is publicly announced, Lomeli learns that the new pope is intersex. Benítez explains that the late pope knew about his circumstances and had supported him; Lomeli chooses not to overturn the election or expose his private medical history.
The revelation develops through an inquiry about a planned medical appointment that Benítez did not complete. In the novel, an examination after an injury in Iraq had led him to discover the variation in his sex characteristics. He had been raised and had lived as a man without previously knowing about it.
It is misleading to describe the twist simply as a woman disguising herself to become pope. That implies a knowingly false identity maintained as a scheme to gain office. Benítez’s account concerns an intersex man whose understanding of his own body changed in adulthood.
The discovery gives Lomeli another secret immediately after he has spent the election exposing damaging secrets. His final decision depends on recognising that this one differs in kind from vote-buying or concealed misconduct. Benítez’s bodily characteristics do not supply evidence that his compassion or judgement was fraudulent.
Lomeli has also heard the intervention that persuaded the cardinals to elect him. The revelation does not erase that demonstrated capacity. To treat the private information as automatically disqualifying would mean giving a category greater weight than the person’s actual conduct.
The ending therefore completes the challenge raised by the homily. Lomeli asked for a leader who could live with uncertainty. Now he must tolerate a result that exceeds his own assumptions, while making a concrete decision rather than retreating into abstract openness.
How the Book Differs From the Film
Edward Berger’s 2024 adaptation retains the broad election story and the final revelation, but several details change. The novel’s Jacopo Lomeli becomes Thomas Lawrence, played by Ralph Fiennes. The difference is worth keeping clear because summaries often transfer the film name into accounts of the book.
Benítez’s background also changes. Harris’s novel makes him Filipino and places his ministry in Baghdad; the film presents a Mexican cardinal associated with Kabul. The underlying dramatic function remains similar: he brings experience of conflict from beyond the Vatican’s familiar political centre.
The circumstances of his medical discovery differ too. The book connects it to treatment after an injury in Iraq, while the film describes an appendectomy. These are separate versions of the same eventual revelation, and neither should be used to correct the other’s continuity.
The novel also gives sustained access to Lomeli’s internal arguments. On screen, performance, pauses and visual arrangement must carry much of that work. The change makes personal ambition differently available: prose can show the reasoning by which a person justifies himself, while film can hold the audience outside a face that does not explain everything.
Neither version’s fictional election should be mistaken for a report of an actual conclave. Its procedures create a convincing dramatic environment, but the candidates, scandals and resolution belong to Harris’s invented story and the adaptation made from it.
The ending’s strongest idea is the distinction between exposing corruption and exposing difference. Lomeli has learned that secrecy can manipulate an election, but he must also learn that disclosure is not automatically virtuous. Benítez’s election asks him to judge the new pope by the qualities that became visible during the crisis, and to accept that a faithful decision may challenge the categories through which he expected to recognise it.
Sources
Conclave — Penguin Random House Higher Education: publication details and authorised novel excerpt.
Conclave Summary and Study Guide — SuperSummary: novel-specific sequence, Lomeli’s choices and election developments.
Conclave (Novel) — Wikipedia: supplementary cross-check of the novel’s candidates, ballots and ending.
Conclave — Publishers Weekly: contemporary review and institutional context.
Conclave — The Movie Spoiler: separate verification of the adaptation’s plot and medical-revelation details.
Conclave Ending Explained — Radio Times: film-ending cross-check.
