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Welcome to Holy Smoke, the Spectator's Religion podcast.

I'm Damien Tolson.

Pope Francis, as we all know, is critically ill with pneumonia in the Dremelieu Hospital in Rome.

There are prayer vigils for him all over the world, and this has inevitably raised the question of what might happen, should he not survive.

Obviously, there will be a conclave,

which, by a rather dark coincidence, is a subject that is on lots of people's minds,

because the film conclave, which I think is rather good, despite certain implausibility in the plot,

though not as good as the fantastic thriller.

This has been nominated for an Oscar, and indeed the cast of Conclave,

who include Ray Fines and the great Stanley Tucci, and Isabella Rossellini,

have sent a message of goodwill to the Ealing Pontiff.

The news is not good at all.

And all sorts of people are asking, well, what is a conclave?

What happens in a conclave? And there's an awful lot that is in the book, but not actually shown in the film. I think one of my criticisms of the film was that it would have been even more

nail-biting and exciting if we'd seen more of the process of those cumulative ballads.

We're very lucky to be joined today by one of the world's most distinguished Catholic canon

lawyers, Dr. Kurt Martins, who's a professor of canon law at the Catholic University in

America, in Washington, D.C. And he's here to tell us a little bit about the process of a conclave, the very complicated

...