The Pope has been laid to rest. Here’s what happens next

The recent movie Conclave, adapted from the 2016 Robert Harris novel about skulduggery in the Vatican, opens with a particularly dramatic flourish. The pope lies dead in his bed chamber. With visible effort, a red-capped cardinal wrenches an enormous ring from the great man’s stubborn finger. Whereupon another cardinal, played by the towering John Lithgow, whacks the ring with a ceremonial hammer, splits it in two and solemnly declares: “Sede vacante”, Latin for “with the seat being vacant”.

It not only makes for captivating viewing, but the ritual is also actually (mostly) true. The so-called Ring of the Fisherman, a signet ring historically used by the pope to seal letters and documents with wax, is symbolically broken upon his death. Once upon a time, it was to physically prevent forgeries; today, the act signifies the end of his authority. “I don’t think the cardinals quite behave as they’re depicted [in Conclave],” says Miles Pattenden, a historian of the Catholic Church, “but in terms of how it lays out the process, it’s pretty good.”

In real life, the funeral arrangements and subsequent machinations dictating how the next pope is chosen are also cloaked in mystique, following “a very well-established protocol which goes back, ultimately, into the Middle Ages”, says Pattenden, co-author of The Cambridge History of the Papacy. The selection of a new pope – who is regarded in Catholicism to be a successor to St Peter, one of the 12 apostles, the first bishop of Rome – reverberates not only with the 1.4 billion Catholics worldwide but with anyone influenced by his leadership and worldview.

So, what does happen immediately after a pope dies? What is the conclave? And what is the significance of black or white smoke from the roof of the Sistine Chapel?

What happens after a pope dies?

It used to be thought that once a pope had died, those present double-checked by tapping him on the forehead with a silver hammer. Maybe it happened back in the mists of time; more likely, it’s a myth – the Vatican denies it, at least. Instead, the official process begins when the head of the Vatican’s health department confirms a pope’s death, after which the camerlengo of the Holy Roman Church, the senior official who oversees the papal household (currently Irish-born Cardinal Kevin Farrell), assumes the role of the Vatican’s de facto administrator.

The pope’s body is dressed in a white cassock. In a ceremony, the camerlengo calls out the pope’s name three times and, when he does not reply, formally states he is dead.

The camerlengo then arranges for the destruction of the Ring of the Fisherman, which traditionally carried an image of St Peter fishing from a boat and was used until the mid-19th century to seal official documents. Exactly how it gets destroyed today is caught up in mythology, but the outcome is it’s defaced, so it can’t be used.

“It used to be done with a chisel and a hammer. In some movies, they show you, they crack it totally; in others, they just put a line through it,” says Darius von Guttner, a historian at Australian Catholic University. “The moment it is destroyed and cannot be used again, that means the authority of the pope is finished.”

The camerlengo then authorises official documents authenticating the pope’s death and a statement to the media and seals the pope’s residence. The Catholic Church observes nine days of mourning, several days of which have been traditionally set for the pope’s embalmed body to lie in state at St Peter’s Basilica – the spiritual centre for Roman Catholics – where people flow past to pay respects.

Francis has eschewed more elaborate rituals for his own funeral rites: unlike that of previous popes, his body will not be displayed on a raised pedestal. A pope traditionally had three coffins nested in one another, of cypress, lead and oak, but Francis has chosen to have one simple coffin. The Vatican’s master of liturgical ceremonies, Monsignor Diego Ravelli, said in 2024 that the new rites were meant “to emphasise even more that the Roman pontiff’s funeral is that of a shepherd and disciple of Christ and not of a powerful man of this world”.

A funeral must take place four to six days after the pope’s death. This funeral will almost certainly take place at St Peter’s Square, the huge plaza in front of St Peter’s Basilica, which can fit about 300,000 people. Francis will be buried, according to tradition, with coins minted during his papacy and a canister containing a “rogito” or deed that lists details of his life and papacy and is read aloud before the coffin is closed.

‘The fact of this is that it’s the most secretive election process on Earth.’

Vatican correspondent Christopher White

Popes are usually buried at the Vatican Grottoes, vaults beneath St Peter’s; Francis, however, has chosen to be buried in central Rome at St Mary Major, a major basilica. “It’s a church that’s very close to him. He used to go there and pray during his visits to Rome before he became Pope,” says Christopher White, a Vatican correspondent for National Catholic Reporter. “It’s quite fitting, in my estimation, that this man who was elected in 2013 as an outsider has chosen to be buried outside the Vatican. He didn’t like to be shackled by the Vatican. He often said when he travelled it was when he was at his freest because he viewed the Vatican as a prison. So it makes all the sense in the world that he wants to go to his eternal rest somewhere outside the Vatican walls.”

What’s the conclave?

Upon news of the Pope’s death (or his likely imminent demise), cardinals from around the world descend on Rome for the conclave, the meeting that occurs only for the particular purpose of choosing a new pope.

After the funeral, the cardinals attend meetings called general congregations where they discuss the state of the Catholic Church and what kind of leader it might need at this point in history, including on issues such as climate change, migration and same-sex marriage. “There will be those looking for a candidate of continuity, someone that will continue the reforms of Pope Francis, making the Catholic Church more welcoming, less hierarchical, less clericalist, a priority for those on the margins,” White says. “And then there will be those that want perhaps a candidate who reverts back to some of the priorities of Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. That camp would see some of the reforms of the Francis papacy as going too far.”

The forging of alliances can be tricky for journalists to report on. “The fact of this is that it’s the most secretive election process on Earth,” says White. “You know, these meetings take place behind closed doors. So, of course, we rely on leaks and sort of talking to cardinals willing to paint a portrait of the conversations that are taking place, and then when they enter the conclave, really, no one has any clue what happens until a new pope emerges.”

After these initial meetings comes the formal conclave, now of movie fame. Church rules state the conclave must begin between 15 and 20 days after the death of the pope. This is when the cardinals assemble in the Sistine Chapel, under Michelangelo’s famous fresco, behind locked doors (conclave comes from the Latin for “room that can be locked up”) to contemplate, discuss and then vote for the next pope. All 252 members of the College of Cardinals can attend, but only those aged under 80 on the day that it commences are allowed to vote: today, it’s some 138 electors. (In 1975, St Paul VI ruled that there should not be more than 120 cardinal electors at any one time, but John Paul II and Pope Benedict both exceeded this limit, which is now seen as an “arbitrary ceiling”, says White.)

Once in the chapel, the cardinal electors don’t interact with anybody beyond its doors. The chapel is barred from electronic communication and has even, in the past, been swept for bugs. “The secrecy is there to protect cardinal electors from the outside world,” says Darius von Guttner. “When they actually sit down in those chairs in the Sistine Chapel, they’re supposed to vote in accordance with what they feel, what they think, and what divine inspiration gives them.” Pattenden elaborates: “The theology of it is that the Holy Spirit descends on the cardinals, he enters into them, and he inspires their choice. So the man is picked by God and therefore can claim to be God’s representative.”

‘It’s not just the conniving backstabbing that some popular culture makes it out to be. There’s often a lot of serious talks and theological issues and debates.’

Theologian Joel Hodge

Nevertheless, Conclave author Robert Harris told Publishers Weekly in 2016, “It is between the ballots, in the lunch breaks and in the evenings that the politics happens. The cardinals gather in one another’s rooms, in the corridors and in the dining rooms. There are factions. They switch their votes, trying to rally the maximum support behind the candidate who best represents their view. It’s nothing new. This has been going on for seven centuries.”

Says White: “I think the film is completely implausible. It’s the stuff of fiction, and so viewers shouldn’t be expecting any sort of imitation of that. At the same time, I think the film is a love letter to the Vatican’s pomp and circumstance … and so there will be many, many similarities on that.” Joel Hodge, a theologian at the Australian Catholic University, agrees: “It’s not just the conniving backstabbing that some popular culture makes it out to be. There’s often a lot of serious talks and theological issues and debates.”

Historically, the cardinals used to be physically barred from leaving the chapel until a decision was made; these days, under rules laid out by Saint John Paul II in 1996, the Universi Dominici Gregis, they are allowed to retire to their rooms in the Casa Santa Marta guesthouse, but are still strictly forbidden from revealing what goes on, under pain of excommunication.

How does voting work (and what does the smoke mean)?

Technically, the Cardinal College can elect to the papacy any baptised, unmarried Catholic man. In practice, a requirement that the pope be at least a bishop (cardinals are leaders often selected from the roughly 5000 bishops around the world) rules out most dreamers. It’s extremely likely that the successful candidate will come from within the cardinals in the conclave itself: the last non-cardinal to be elected pope was the Archbishop of Bari, Urban VI, way back in 1378.

A chemical brew is added to a little furnace to change the colour of the resulting smoke.

There is actually no list of candidates (although some cardinals might make it known they are not interested in the role to excuse themselves from the vote). Electors simply write a name on a piece of paper on which is printed the words “Eligo in Summum Pontificem”, Latin for “I elect as supreme pontiff”, according to Gerard O’Connell in his 2019 book The Election of Pope Francis: An Inside Account of the Conclave that Changed History. The cardinals then deposit the slip into an urn, saying loudly: “I call as my witness Christ the Lord, who will be my judge, that my vote is given to the one who, before God, I think should be elected.” The victor requires a two-thirds majority – arrived at after multiple rounds of voting.

The first day of the conclave has just one voting round; there are up to four rounds on each subsequent day. Votes are overseen by three scrutineers – cardinals ineligible to vote – who call out the name of each person who receives a vote as the tally is counted, record the results and then burn the ballots. A chemical brew is added to a little furnace to change the colour of the resulting smoke: black means a decision has not been made and white means that a new pope will soon be announced.

As votes are tallied, frontrunners come into focus. After the first round, electors might end up ditching their initial choice to back one of several new frontrunners. “That spiritual nature of it also should not be discounted – that, you know, they really search their feelings as to who is the best among them to do it,” says von Guttner.

There is no limit on how long the process takes: the longest conclave in history, starting in 1268, lasted 34 months. The 1740 election of Benedict XIV lasted 181 days, during which four electors died. Pope Francis was elected in about 24 hours after five ballots.

Once the victor is declared, the new pope-elect is asked whether they accept the role. “You are the pope from the moment you say, ‘Yes, I accept,’” says von Guttner. The pope can take a new name. Francis, born Jorge Mario Bergoglio, took his name from the 13th-century saint Francis of Assisi, known for challenging church norms and serving the poor.

The new pope then heads to a room to one side of the chapel known as the Sala de Lacrima, or Room of Tears (where Pope Leo XIII is said to have cried upon his election in 1878). There, he changes out of his red cardinal robes into the white papal vestments, three sizes of which are laid out ready to be tailored to fit. Meanwhile, the public waits for the identity of the new pope to be revealed when he is presented on the central balcony at St Peter’s Basilica.

What factors can sway the vote?

In 2013, after the surprise resignation of Benedict XVI, the conclave was clearly of a mind to shake things up a little. While the Italian cardinal Angelo Scola initially emerged as a frontrunner, so did the lesser-known Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Jorge Bergoglio. “Three factors leaned heavily in Bergoglio’s favour,” writes Gerard O’Connell. “First, the great majority of Latin American cardinals were supporting him, with not one of them speaking badly about him; second, he had revealed his ability to communicate and inspire … and third, he had support from Asians and Africans as well as Europeans.”

Once elected, Bergoglio, as Pope Francis, signalled he would live a more spartan life than his predecessors, declining to move into the opulent Vatican Palace and instead taking an apartment at the more modest Casa Santa Marta guesthouse. “He is experimenting with this type of living arrangement, which is simple,” a Vatican spokesperson said at the time.

‘No pope has ever really been able to control the election of his successor, partly because once he dies, their obligations to him are over.’

Historian Miles Pattenden

Pope Francis was prepared to speak out on issues such as immigration and climate change and was viewed by some as sympathetic to groups the church had traditionally excluded, including same-sex couples and divorcees.

Whether the next pope will follow a similar path may be influenced by the kind of cardinals that Francis himself installed during his tenure: he selected around 80 per cent of the cardinals eligible to vote. Instead of favouring Vatican insiders, he cast a wide net, empowering leaders from some 70 nations worldwide. Also in the mix was the Australian Bishop Mykola Bychok of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, who became the youngest member of the College of Cardinals in December, at age 44.

“Francis has made some very idiosyncratic choices,” says Pattenden, who notes, however, “No pope has ever really been able to control the election of his successor, partly because once he dies, their obligations to him are over.”

So, who might be in the picture?

“For many centuries,” says Pattenden, who is affiliated with Oxford and Deakin universities, “there was a preference to choose Italians. Now, there may be a preference to choose someone from the Global South because that’s the image that the cardinals want to present to the church.” (The Global South is a term sometimes used to broadly group developing nations.) An African pope is a possibility, he says, suggesting Cardinal Robert Sarah from Guinea in West Africa, whom Francis appointed to a senior position in the Vatican in 2014 (he’s now 79). The (much younger, at 67) Archbishop of Manila, Luis Tagle, is also a contender, says Pattenden.

Others to watch include Pietro Parolin, the 70-year-old cardinal secretary of state. “He’ll be a significant candidate, I would think, in the next election, says Pattenden. “Presumably, every cardinal will have different sets of criteria, certain qualities they’re looking for,” he says. “Which ones they think are more or less important will vary from person to person. But they’ve had 12 years to identify the faults and flaws in Pope Francis, so they’ll look for someone who remedies those.” Says Joel Hodge: “One of the criticisms of Pope Francis has been that he hasn’t been doctrinally clear and rigorous enough. He’s given some very interesting teachings, like around the environment, but sometimes he’s been a little bit unclear.”

Vatican correspondent Christopher White expects to see a conservative bloc supporting a figure such as Cardinal Peter Erdo of Hungary and a progressive group aligning behind Luis Antonio Tagle of the Philippines or a moderate such as Parolin. Then there is always the X factor, says White. “There are all sorts of unknown figures who can and almost certainly will emerge during a conclave process.”

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