Blaming the Catholic Church for the death of his wife, filmmaker Henry Hawkins is determined to make an expose revealing the Church's responsibility. Not divulging the true intentions of his documentary, Henry's quest leads him to Rome where he's promised access to the Vatican by its highest ranking cardinal, Silvio Contini, the Secretary of State of Vatican City. After arriving in the Eternal City, Cardinal Contini reneges on his agreement to meet with Henry. Refusing to have his plan compromised, Henry devises a bold scheme to get behind the impregnable walls of the Vatican to confront Contini. The sudden death of the pope, and a quirk of fate, throw Henry into a whirlwind when he is isolated in the inner sanctum of the papal conclave where he covertly records the secret election process, and clandestinely films Contini's unscrupulous method of eliminating papal candidates for his own agenda. Henry's obsession to avenge his wife's death is put in jeopardy when his tapes are stolen and he discovers that if Contini is elected pope he would alter sacred Church doctrine thereby destroying the meaning of his wife's death, and all that she believed in. To prevent this, Henry must reclaim his tapes, while ultimately deciding whether to smuggle them out of the conclave, and use the information they reveal to make his documentary, or exploit them to the voting cardinals to stop Contini's election, and uphold the dignity of his wife's death."