I’m late to the ‘party’, because I only saw the movie tonight.
But ‘hermaphrodite’ is exactly how I interpreted the ending.
People are sometimes born with ambiguous sexual characteristics, and the actor playing “Benitez’ says very clearly in the film that when he was born, they had no way of knowing about things like that. He was raised as a boy, and that’s all he knew.
The Vatican politics were not the most interesting thing about the film, for me; everyone knows that politics there are as nasty as politics anywhere. But the human psychology of the various characters was fascinating; and the issue of someone who thought he was a man all his life, until a health crisis revealed that he was ‘different’, was something to think about, too.
(I wonder how many people commenting on this thread have actually bothered to read the book...)
Did you catch how they demonized the traditional Cardinal?