Conclave

The conclave to elect a new pope becomes a battle between four leading candidates—Bellini, Tremblay, Adeyemi, and Tedesco—but each is undone in turn. Adeyemi's candidacy collapses after Dean Lomeli learns, through a confession from Sister Shanumi Iwaro, that Adeyemi fathered a child with her decades earlier when she was a young postulant and he a village priest; word of the scandal spreads and dooms his chances. Tremblay's candidacy then implodes when Lomeli discovers that Tremblay had orchestrated Sister Shanumi's sudden transfer to Rome, apparently to weaponize the scandal against Adeyemi, and, more damningly, uncovers a suppressed report proving Tremblay committed simony by bribing cardinals for support. Lomeli distributes the report to the college, and Tremblay is finished as a candidate.

Amid the chaos, a bomb explodes in the Sistine Chapel as part of a coordinated series of terrorist attacks by Islamic extremists against Catholic targets across Europe. No one inside is hurt, and after competing reactions from Tedesco (calling for retaliation) and the quiet, unassuming Filipino cardinal Vincent Benítez (arguing against meeting violence with violence), the cardinals proceed to vote again. Lomeli himself had unexpectedly become a leading contender, but in the eighth ballot the college elects Benítez, the Archbishop of Baghdad whom the deceased pope had secretly created a cardinal without public announcement. Benítez accepts and takes the name Innocent XIV.

Just before the result is announced publicly, Lomeli's assistant reveals that Benítez had once booked, then cancelled, an appointment at a gender reassignment clinic in Geneva. Lomeli confronts the new pope privately, and Benítez explains that he is intersex, a fact he only discovered in adulthood after being injured in a bombing in Iraq and examined by a doctor for the first time. He had attempted to resign so he could undergo surgery, but the dying pope refused his resignation, appointed him cardinal in pectore anyway, and Benítez ultimately chose not to have the surgery, continuing his priestly duties as he always had.

Lomeli, now alone with this knowledge, recognizes that the truth about Benítez's body will likely surface eventually, whether through a future medical exam or after his death. But he decides to say nothing, choosing instead to trust that the conclave's outcome—arrived at through all the scheming, scandal, and violence of the preceding days—was nonetheless the working of divine will. The novel ends with Lomeli keeping this secret, and the newly elected Pope Innocent XIV about to greet the world for the first time.