Pride turns out not to be the Cardinal's strength, after all, but his weakness. It's a cover for his shame over his beginnings as the son of a fishwife, a schoolboy who was ridiculed for the way he smelled. The Interrogator has the Cardinal's mother sedated and laid on a gurney before her son. At first the Cardinal thinks she's been killed; when he realizes she's alive the Interrogator tells him that she'll be sent to a research hospital, where she will be ill, unless he confesses.
The Cardinal doesn't know that his mother has already been put in the hospital and the Interrogator doesn't suspect that the Cardinal, who grew up listening to her cavorting with lovers in the next room, doesn't love his mother. But once the Cardinal tells him so, the Interrogator immediately makes use of that. (This is peculiarly far from Mindszenty's story. He called his mother to him as soon as he realized he would be arrested in 1948 and "she declared she would go the way of the cross in the footsteps of the Mater dolorosa." He later said his mother was "the light of the sun" for him during his "semi-imprisonment" in the American Embassy.)
The Interrogator then wears the Cardinal down for a number of months with exhaustion and isolation until he's dying to talk; when they reconvene, the Interrogator gets the Cardinal to psychologize about his decision to enter the church. The priest, hysterically self-reflective at this point, loses his sense of vocation and sees his entire career as a vainglorious sham that he'd be grateful to dispense with. Sex isn't the Cardinal's weakness - this niche-carving of a prelate can't be tempted onto lower ground, only higher.
The Interrogator offers him purgation by ruining his "false" reputation: the Cardinal must avow in open court, for instance, that he betrayed the resistance to the Nazis for money. That isn't the kind of fake the Cardinal now feels himself to be, but the Interrogator convinces him that it's better to be despised as the wrong kind of fake than to remain in possession of "stolen" honor.
Screenwriter Bridget Boland, adapting her own play, injects into the story the irony that the Cardinal's participation in the desecration of his reputation becomes sincere. His being broken may even be seen as a genuine religious experience, and, as the Interrogator notes, the Cardinal is a stronger man afterwards. (In his trials Mindszenty kept with him a picture of Christ crowned with thorns inscribed, Devictus vincit - Defeated, he is victorious. And in prison he thanked the Lord that He had found him worthy to share shame with his savior.)
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