This article contains a major spoiler for the 2024 film Conclave.
Susan Bin is not a Catholic. She tells Rolling Stone that she’s been to a single Mass service in her life, “and that’s a long story.” But she’s engaged with the church from an academic perspective as someone who works in fine art and has an education in art history. She has studied everything from early Christian art to papal sarcophagi to the Renaissance transformation of Old St. Peter’s Basilica into the basilica that stands in Vatican City today.
And yet, despite her mainly scholarly interest in Catholicism, the world turned its eyes to Pope Crave, an X account Bin created just five months ago, for up-to-the-second news about this week’s conclave to elect a successor to the late Pope Francis. And, with help from collaborators and church insiders, she broke the news that a selection had been made before mainstream media or the Vatican’s own news service did. How, exactly, did that happen?
Long story short, Bin wound up on the Vatican beat because she really, really likes the Oscar-winning 2024 film Conclave, starring Ralph Fiennes, which is about the palace intrigue and power struggles that arise when cardinals are convened in Rome to elect a new pope. “I mean, you probably liked it a normal amount,” she says. “I did not like it a normal amount.”
Though it’s not the kind of movie Bin, who also does work in TV and film, normally gravitates toward, “you cannot deny the pageantry of the Catholic church,” she explains. To her, the trailer suggested “a film that I would just watch for the aesthetics, just to break it down by costume design or lighting, from a technical perspective.” She had read the novel Conclave before heading to the theater, yet the screen adaptation surprised her. “I was like one of three people on my screening, and I was laughing. It was very sincere, but there are moments that are very funny in this film. And it’s silent as hell in this theater. I was like, ‘You guys aren’t getting it.’”
This was in the fall of 2024, when Bin was working as an election clerk in Collin County, Texas, a conservative region outside the solidly blue Dallas area, where she lives. The politics of Conclave, and its hopeful electoral resolution, “became a coping mechanism” in this stressful moment, she says. “With everything going on, I was like, let me go back to this movie where we elected intersex pope from Mexico, and it has no dominant white heteronormative structure. I need this.”
By December, @ClubConcrave, a.k.a. “Pope Crave” — the names nod to notorious Timothée Chalamet stan account @ClubChalamet and the pop culture feed Pop Crave — was born. Bin meant it to be a promotional feed for the Conclave fan zine she was working on, From the Crooked Timber of Humanity, which ultimately included more than 70 pages of art and writing exploring the themes and characters in Conclave from dozens of contributors. (Profits from the publication go to the Intersex Human Rights Fund, Freedom Fund, and Librarians and Archivists with Palestine, with around $75,000 donated to the date.)
As Bin started posting Conclave memes on the account, mixing references to the religious thriller with Garfield content and characters from The Devil Wears Prada, she realized that she was hardly alone in her obsession. “This film obviously generated a fandom that probably surprises the strategy people at Focus [the distributor of Conclave] in that it’s youth-leaning, extremely global, and also very queer,” she says. She notes that Noelia Caballero, her co-admin on the account, is a “queer Catholic in ministry” and international human rights lawyer.
“When you see the film, that makes a lot of sense, as opposed to it just being this prestige drama for Academy voters,” Bin says. “There’s a lot of people who are part of the part of the zine who are Catholic and have really complicated relationships like queerness and their place in the Catholic church, and people who are from the global south.”
After repping Conclave through awards season, which saw it claim the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, Bin and Caballero turned their attention to Pope Francis’ ailing health, and they discussed plans to fly to Rome to cover the conclave following his death. When he died on April 21, Easter Monday, they realized such a trip wouldn’t be feasible, resolving instead to monitor the live camera feed of the Sistine Chapel chimney that releases white smoke when a pope is chosen, and black smoke for each inconclusive vote among the cardinals. On Wednesday and Thursday, Bin even woke up at 3 a.m. to follow developments from the Vatican as the conclave began and stretched into a second day.
By this time, however, the Conclave zine and larger social media phenomenon had spawned a Discord of devoted fans ready to pitch in on coverage. “People reached out — Cravers — and they were like, ‘Hey, I’m going to be in Vatican City. Can I be a local correspondent?’” Bin says. She immediately designed unofficial press credentials that said Pope Crave, which at least two individuals printed out and brought to St. Peter’s Square. One of them gave an interview to the BBC. “We were boots on the ground,” Bin says. “We were doing it DIY punk, very fandom style.”
Bin says she had figured that statistically speaking, the conclave would wrap by Friday. Better still: she then got an “insider leak” that it would conclude by Thursday. (She is not sharing the names of the sources she describes as “informants” or details of their knowledge about Vatican procedures.) That gave her the edge she needed to beat the competition on “smoke watch,” and she announced the next pope’s election just after 6 p.m. local time in Rome with a meme that read “HOLY SMOKE WE GOT A POPE.” Followers reveled in Pope Crave’s triumph, calling the account the “fastest news outlet on earth” and expressing their joy at seeing the news break there.
“I’m very proud,” Bin says, regardless of soon afterward misidentifying the new pope as Cardinal Pietro Parolin instead of Cardinal Robert Prevost, who became the first American pontiff as Leo XIV. The inaccurate announcement was swiftly corrected, and Bin says she has some research to do on Prevost. “I’m not the expert on this dude,” she says. “I haven’t even read his Wikipedia article.” Caballero, meanwhile, shared a statement on Pope Crave stating her opinion that the cardinals had picked an American in response to President Trump and a rising global tide of fascism. She also noted that Prevost has in the past spoken against “gender ideology” and “leniency” for the LGBTQ community. “As a lesbian Catholic I am disappointed but am here to remind all LGBTQ+ Catholics: you are loved and you belong here,” she wrote.
“Are we going to keep eyes on Pope Leo?” Bin says. “Absolutely, in the sense that everything is political. He’s a spiritual leader, but he exists in a very political context.” What’s more, Pope Crave is closing in on the 100,000-follower mark. “I’m pretty sure a lot of our followers are Catholic this point,” Bin speculates. “Based on the fighting that I’m seeing happening in the comments — oh, it’s Catholic discourse happening.” And she’s glad that the account, like Conclave itself, is allowing people to “really dig into their relationship to the pope, with religion, with the church.”
Of course, as Bin demonstrates, you don’t have to take communion every Sunday to be part of this club. Questions of faith and human stories of the divine have a resonance that supersede any particular form of worship. Which is also why anybody can find potent meaning in Conclave. “All the characters in that film are going through it,” Bin says. “And that experience is not specific to Catholicism.” God, it would seem, is more universal.
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