How the papal conclave became a pop culture phenomenon

Fandom is a strange beast. There are plenty of dedicated online and offline fanbases for things which have no business having stans. Some notable examples include the movie Tár; the professional relationship between Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown; the sexual undertones in the My Little Pony series; and now, the election of a new Pontiff.

As a lifelong Catholic, I have never seen anything quite like this week’s feverish following of the conclave, the secretive process in which Pope Francis’s successor was found (and I once saw grown women weep over a blood-stained glove that was supposed to belong to Padre Pio). For hundreds of years the business of electing the next Pope was a secretive and mysterious affair, one that took place behind (ornate) closed doors. The elected cardinal was a Holy stranger amongst other strangers. Even the last conclave, which elected Pope Francis, took place just before the true social media boom – and most invested faithful were forced to follow along to the drama on AM radio.

But this time around it was an online spectacle, a semi-ironic outpouring of fandom both for the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics and the suddenly-interested billions of other religions who joined forces on X to stan their favourites. The conclave took over the internet for much of this week: watching smoke emanating from a chimney in Vatican City became “the social event of the year”. The Met Gala was eclipsed, the world forgot about Arsenal crashing out to PSG. All we cared about was the conclave. The movie Conclave exploded in renewed popularity, with posts comparing art to reality. Someone invented conclave flavoured ice-cream. Harry Styles was spotted in the crowds of Vatican City. Posts gushed over the aesthetics of High Catholicism, people suddenly became experts in how cardinals could be seen to communicate their conservative or liberal politics through fashion (the size of their crosses, the length of their robes). This was not just conclave, this was conclavecore.

We collectively treated the cardinals, in other words, as though they were political candidates or, as one person put it, ‘a middle aged boy-band’. We rooted for our favourites like this was Eurovision rather than the Catholic Church. Cardinals Tagle and Pizzaballa emerged as the internet’s favourites, the latter because of the assumption he would continue on Pope Francis’s legacy of speaking out on Gaza. Techbros, inevitably, were attempting to run insider trading on the entire proceedings. 

The entire spectacle may have temporarily reinvigorated the Nazi graveyard that is present day X for one glorious moment, but it also introduced an element of confusion – or what therapy speak internet might call ‘transference’ –  to the whole conclave. Catholic theology tells us that the Pope, no matter who he is, is infallible as God’s representative on earth. When he’s elected by cardinals, Catholics are meant to believe that the cardinals are not just picking their favourite or choosing their mates, but that God is speaking through them. It’s difficult to communicate this through irony-soaked posts about the new Pope eating Chicago Town pizza or working at the diner from The Bear, or being Chappell Roan, though. 

When Pope Leo XIV was elected on Thursday, the conclavecore bubble pulsated and threatened to pop. An uneasy, uncertain hush fell over the crowds of the internet as the crowds in St Peter’s Square exploded into jubilant ‘olés’. Was Leo going to be a liberal pope, or a conservative? Nobody could be sure. Conclavecore had spent so long wringing their hands over the Ghanaian and Hungarian candidates or rooting for the Filipino and Italian candidates that they were blindsided by the reality that the new leader of the Catholic Church was, of all things, an American. Yes, an American who once criticised JD Vance on Twitter, but an American all the same. 

One of the joys of the internet’s first conclave was the presence of PopeCrave, a parody account which went from posting Conclave memes to somehow managing to get press accreditation and follow the cardinals every move inside the Basilica. After the announcement of Pope Leo’s election, one of the accounts admins posted a short ‘need to know’ infographic about what his new papacy might look like. The charge sheet was serious; he had criticised so-called “gender ideology” and “Western leniency” on LGBTQ+ issues during his time in Peru. He was accused of mishandling sexual assault allegations against priests in his own diocese. “As a lesbian Catholic I am disappointed”, the post by co-admin Noelia Caballero concluded. 

Plenty of conclave-posters shared her worries. It makes sense, from an internet fandom perspective at the very least: fandom has always been queer-coded and it found an unlikely but happy ally in Catholicism, which for all its conservative doctrine, is admittedly also queer-coded, aesthetically at least. One of PopeCrave’s admins has a professional background in queer Catholic ministry, the other in International Human Rights Law. It’s the pageantry, the wine, the Heavenly Bodies Met Gala theme, the whole thing. As one user put it: “If the Catholic Church didn’t want gay people to be so interested in it, they should stop slaying so hard”.

But the problem with trying to make the Catholic Church fandom queer-coded in a way that you could do with a TV show, a movie, or a boy-band is that it doesn’t only exist on the internet, to serve fans who consume its content (sadly). It’s true that the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics, who Pope Leo will have to lead and represent, can influence the direction of the Church in a small way, but not a significant one – the introduction of Vatican 2 in the 1960s, once perceived as dangerously liberal, took place because the Pope at the time saw that the Church needed ‘updating’ or it would hemorrhage members and eventually die.

Many of the criticisms levelled at Pope Leo yesterday, while valid, were not individual to him; they’re problems within the wider church that are overlooked when we flatten it to internet fandom. Asking ‘did the Pope act slowly on allegations of clerical sexual abuse’ or ‘could the Pope be more accepting of LGBTQ+ people’ is kind of like asking ‘is the Pope a Catholic’? 

All the conclave madness exposed a bitter truth at the heart of something really pretty fun to be a part of: you can’t boycott the Catholic Church the way you can stop watching a show or burn a vinyl record – even when you’re a terrible Catholic who has not been to Mass in many moons, like me, you’re only considered ‘lapsed’, not excommunicated. Perhaps a better way to think of it is that there’s a difference between ‘cultural Catholicism’ (liking rosary beads, reading Graham Greene, blessing yourself on instinct, being a bit too attached to the smell of incense, praying to St Anthony when you lose your keys despite not actually believing in God) and ‘actual Catholicism’ (getting on board with transubstantiation, not being able to eat meat on Fridays, not being able to get an abortion, so on and so forth). Most of the internet’s conclavecore Catholics don’t want to belong to the latter. But it’s hard to deny us access to the former, because the former is undeniably fun. I know I’d choose woke Marxist pope memes over going to confession almost any day of the week. (Not on Sunday, though. On Sundays we rest.)