On the morning of Easter Sunday, Pope Francis met with JD Vance. Just a few hours later, he made his final public appearance, delivering the Urbi et Orbi address to a square filled with pilgrims, dedicating it to a call for peace in Gaza. The image of him rolling through the crowd in his popemobile, summoning the strength to offer those last words, stayed with me as I went to bed.
A few hours later, I wake up in France, where I am visiting a friend, to a text from my father: “The Pope is dead.” A wave of phone calls follows. My mother texts the same news, but in her rush to be the bearer of dramatic headlines (nothing delights her more), her phone autocorrects “papa,” adding an accent—so for a brief, heart-stopping moment, her message reads as though my own father had just died.
This is the second time I’ve been away from Rome when a pope has died. The first was in 2005, when John Paul II passed. I was living in New York then, and I remember spending the entire day glued to CNN. It was the pre-social media era—I might’ve still been using dial-up internet. I was completely hypnotized by Christiane Amanpour’s deep, authoritative voice as she narrated each step of the funerary ritual. I was in awe that such a complex, almost mythological event belonged to my city, to my origins.
I remember the eerie stillness of the funeral, the wind lifting the pages of the Gospel book resting on the pope’s coffin before slamming it shut, and the cardinals’ zucchetti—their skullcaps—tipping off in the breeze. It was one of the largest papal gatherings in history: over 300,000 people in St. Peter’s Square and millions more watching around the world. It was solemn, powerful—almost cinematic. And it was unfolding in my city, while I could only watch it from a screen.
Now, it’s happening again. I m in Paris, with a return flight to Rome scheduled for the exact date and time of Pope Francis’s funeral. I’ll miss it again. As I watch Saint Peter’s Square slowly fill on livestreams, I’m suddenly overwhelmed by a strange sensation I can only describe as “ecclesiastical FOMO.”
“We’ve lost the first pope who had a sense of humor—the most important Franciscan virtue,” my writer friend Barbara Alberti texts me. “We’re screwed now.”
Through a friend, I manage to get in touch with a Vatican insider, Massimo Leonardelli, whose work in charitable initiatives has long brought him into the Church’s inner circles. “I really do wonder if it will be like it was with John Paul,” he says. I’m so desperate for fresh, unfiltered news from Rome that I shamelessly keep him on the phone. I’ve seen the square undergo a real metamorphosis when a pope dies. This time the election is loaded with political meaning. I feel this is part a call to mourn, part a call to arms. Either way, I know I want to be there—if only by proxy. Massimo becomes my lifeline. He walks me through each step of what’s happening. “I just got a text about the funeral from the Santa Sede,” he says. Moments later, he sends me the first images of the Pope in his coffin, via WhatsApp.
“In 2020, the congregation of grief is online. We call one another and spin stories, which we then rehear from others and wonder: Did this story start with me, or are we all saying the same things?” wrote Pakistani author Dur e Aziz Amna in a New York Times editorial on long-distance mourning. The same feels true now. Though I’m not in Rome, the flood of WhatsApp messages and live links from friends and family is constant, overwhelming.
“I couldn’t stay away from the Vatican—walked over twice today. I loved that pope,” one friend writes. Another says he’s already gone twice and stood in line for hours without pulling any strings. “I want to feel one with the popolo,” he says. Not long after, he sends a photo: a line of porta-potties being unloaded on the edge of St. Peter’s Square. This mix of reverence and desecration—that tension between the sacred and the absurd—is exactly the Roman sentiment I miss most right now.
Romans are masters of the profane and irreverent banter. Pasolini, Moravia, Manganelli, Flaiano—all wrote about this specific ethos: the ability to laugh at everything, even death, and to never be surprised, not even by the most seismic shifts. Pasolini, in particular, was drawn to Rome’s split soul—its gleaming, all-powerful official self and its hidden B-side of hunger, flesh, and violence. “We survive, in the confusion / of a life reborn beyond reason,” he wrote in his Roman poems.
So I’m not surprised when I see the shift in atmosphere at St. Peter’s Square—from the joyous celebration of Easter to the solemn mourning of the Pope’s death. Overnight, the mood transforms. Banners give way to black-draped balconies, and the square fills with trampled tulips. Soon enough, Rome’s most delightful cynicism emerges: “Morto un papa se ne fa un altro”—the phrase is tossed around with familiar ease, meaning “One pope dies, another is made.” It’s a pithy expression of Italy’s fatalistic attitude toward change, loss, and the inevitable continuity of institutions. Since Saint Peter in 33 a.c. there have been 266 Popes in Rome, so the expression is fitting. Time and tradition march forward, indifferent to individual fate.
In Saint Peter’s Square, the worshippers are now chasing down wagons hurriedly carting away the tulips and lilies from Easter, stealing flowers as if to hold onto something fleeting; on the radio show La Zanzara the viral TikToker Bombolino pushes the conspiracy theory claiming the Pope has been dead since February, and as the Conclave approaches, Italy is frustrated by the fact that wagering on the papal election is illegal. We too wish we could join the “toto-Papa” market, as it has already driven over $4.5 million in bets on platforms like Polymarket. Online, a flood of posts portray Vance as a Neapolitan jinxer, complete with red horns to ward off bad luck—a surreal, Pasolinian fusion of sacred and profane that would have made him smile.
But alongside the gossip and the gallows humor, the ancient and solemn rituals continue. Massimo tells me the story of the camerlengo, the official who gently calls out the Pope’s baptismal name three times once he is found dead—a centuries-old rite, meant to confirm the Pope’s passing. A medical evaluation is also now part of the protocol today.
Massimo tells me Pope Francis had previously simplified these funeral rites. One of his most symbolic choices is to be buried outside the Vatican, in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore—a place he would visit before and after every major trip. The decision, according to La Repubblica, was an intentional move to avoid the monumentalization of his figure. “He chose to leave the sacred perimeter of the Vatican palaces in death, becoming a migrant toward a burial rooted in prayer.” He will go down in history as the first pope in over a century to be buried outside the Vatican walls. Another revolutionary element is the fact that Francis called himself the Bishop of Rome. “That’s why he refused to emphasize other titles like Vicar of Christ or Supreme Pontiff,” Massimo explains. “He also asked to be laid to rest in a simple casket. He wanted his death to be less spectacular, more in tune with the times—a renewal of millennial practices and ceremonies. His goal was not to be remembered as a powerful man, but as a simple Christian who died in a casket like everyone else.”
Back to the ritual side of things, I think my mother is right when she says: “The only time Romans remember who they are is when a pope dies.” What she means is that in a city where most people are too cool to care about anything, the drama and ceremony of a papal death—and the election that follows—suddenly taps into this ancient sense of grandeur we usually ignore. After all, Rome was once called caput mundi—the capital of the world—a phrase the poet Lucan dropped way back in 65 AD. “I mean, what other city can pull in 40 heads of state and 19 prime ministers overnight?” she asks, half bragging. She remembers watching three conclaves from the rooftop of her place in the neighborhood of Prati, just a stone’s throw from the Vatican. “Every time a pope died,” she says, “my mom would take me up to watch the smoke from the Sistine Chapel. It was the most exciting part of my childhood.”
According to Massimo, this won’t be an easy conclave. Rome is already buzzing with speculation. Our favorite, at least locally, is Matteo Zuppi—or Don Matteo, as everyone calls him in Rome. With many friends from my parents’ generation, he went to the Liceo Virgilio in the late ’60s, a very central high school known for its progressive politics. He observed Roman youth’s involvement with the protests of 1968 and the rise of the terrorist movements and built his own political and spiritual conscience. A member of the Sant’Egidio community, he helped mediate the end of Mozambique’s civil war in 1992 and is known for his outreach to LGBTQ+ Catholics, as well as his work with the homeless and those battling addiction. “He’d be perfect,” my mother says. “He used to say mass for all our friends who overdosed in the ’70s. If you’re writing about him, you have to call him.” I gently remind her he might be a bit busy right now.
Later, Massimo texts one last time: would I like to come say goodbye to the Pope? He sends me the Vatican’s booklet with the ritualistic procedure for the closing of the casket, the prayers, and chants. It’s all in Latin with a translation on the side. I open the document and feel a sudden rush as if I’m peering into centuries of mysterious Roman traditions. The final words on the ritualistic booklet feel so strong they create an almost visual experience:
“The Master of the Pontifical Liturgical Celebrations spreads a white silk veil over the face of the deceased. The celebrant sprinkles the body with holy water. The Master places in the coffin the bag containing the coins and medals minted during the pontificate of the deceased…” Eventually, the wooden coffin is sealed shut. On the hood is a cross and the emblem of the deceased Pontiff.
I finally admit to Massimo that I’ll be stuck in Paris for all of this. It’s impossible to book an early flight out to Rome and security is off the charts. All I can do is stand in line at Notre-Dame, where a photo of Pope Francis sits before the altar, ringed by candles. Keeping one foot in and one foot out—it feels like the most Roman way to say goodbye.