Warning: This post contains spoilers for Conclave. “We are mortal men; we serve an ideal. We cannot always be ideal.” At the center of Robert Harris’ 2016 novel Conclave is this admission, a musing on the tension between the pernicious influence of power and the capacity to maintain moral integrity. The best-selling papal thriller, with a buzzy movie version now in theaters, chronicles how the election of a new pope turns into a politically-charged fight for the soul of the modern-day Catholic Church.