What to see and read about the Vatican

Global reach, giant egos, great wealth: to the sceptical eye, Hollywood studios have much in common with the Vatican. So it is hardly a miracle that papal politics regularly inspire storytellers. “Conclave”, directed by Edward Berger and adapted from Robert Harris’s novel, is the latest drama to make fiction out of warring factions as rival cardinals gather to elect a new pope. It joins a packed congregation of Vatican-themed novels and films. “Since God has given us the papacy, let us enjoy it,” Pope Leo X supposedly said—and there is much to enjoy in the following titles.

Partly set in Rome, this steampunk satire plays clever, comic variations on the Vatican-intrigue plot. In an alternative 1970s, the Reformation never happened; science, along with the works of William Shakespeare, has been subdued. Faithful to Rome, England has supplied the latest pope, John XXIV, a bluff, shrewd Yorkshireman. This is a devilishly witty tale of the pleasures and perils of a cultured but stifling theocracy.

Directed by Costa-Gavras, a Greek master of political skulduggery on film, “Amen” adapts a play by Rolf Hochhuth, a German author, called “Der Stellvertreter” (“The Deputy”). Compellingly, but controversially, Hochhuth depicted Pius XII, the wartime pope, as a Nazi stooge complicit in the Holocaust. Later books and films—such as “Shades of Truth” in 2015—have sought to defend Pius’s conduct. In this story of a repentant SS chemist who seeks to awaken the Vatican’s conscience, “Amen” makes a measured, moving case for the prosecution.

Funny, florid, weird and sad, Frederick Rolfe’s eccentric fictional fantasia is perhaps the only true masterpiece in this peculiar genre. George Arthur Rose, an English drudge, is chosen to be pope after a deadlocked conclave; he shakes up the church and the world even though the solitary scholar really wants “to love, to be loved”. After his whirlwind of innovation ends, relieved churchmen agree that, as Tacitus wrote: “Capax imperii nisi imperasset”. He would have been the ideal ruler—had he never ruled.

This craftily plotted bestseller prophetically imagined an embattled pontiff from behind the Iron Curtain, Kiril Lakota of Ukraine. Elected amid simmering cold-war tension, the anguished reformer sings in the same self-doubting choir as other fictional popes as he wavers between idealism and realpolitik. For Lakota, and West, the church’s “real battleground” lies not in the diplomatic arena but “the secret landscape of the individual spirit”.

Written by Anthony McCarten from his own stage play, this film dramatises the friendship between Benedict XVI and his successor, Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, now Pope Francis. Anthony Hopkins’s Benedict pleads with the troubled Argentine prelate (Jonathan Pryce) not to forsake his vocation—but later announces his own resignation. Progress against tradition, faith against doubt, the parallel pitfalls of Vatican and global politics: Fernando Meirelles’s movie gives an eloquent airing to the mainstays of pontifical plots.

Paolo Sorrentino brought spectacle and glamour, as well as deep-seated melancholy, to two TV series about a brace of misfit pontiffs. First came Jude Law’s brash, erratic American pope (pictured), who hides personal trauma beneath disruptive reform, then John Malkovich’s urbane, feline Englishman, who grapples with his own demons. Both shows offer a baroque blend of ecclesiastical showbiz and studies in the pathology of power. Mr Sorrentino’s stories sometimes bewilder, but they always entertain. ■