The Thing I Was Thinking The Most While Watching Conclave Was Actually A Classmate I Had In Uni Who Is

The thing I was thinking the most while watching Conclave was actually a classmate I had in uni who is a nun. She talked about the role of women on the church and how there should be a woman pope. And like, years ago she was given a scholarship to study philosophy in Rome, except she couldn't. Because the nuns had to perform all the domestic labor for the priests and the workload was too big, add to that stuff like how no one could leave the dinner table before the archbishop and he liked to talk so sometimes he would make everyone stay until late at night and ofc the nuns had to clean up after that, or when the priests wanted to give the nuns an easy day they would decide they would have a picnic, but the nuns still had to prepare their picnic. My friend just couldn't find the time to study, so she dropped her scholarship and came back to Mexico.

And Conclave does such a good job of making this work visible, even when if only Sister Agnes speaks, there is always shots of nuns working. For everything the priests do, it's always shown how the nuns make it possible. Benítez standing out early on for being the one person to thank them. The film ending on a seemingly unrelated shot of nuns walking.

It's a very poignant statement given how reproductive labor is often invisibilized.