After a long battle with health issues, Pope Francis passed away at age 88 on April 21, 2025. Pope Francis is the 266th pope of the Roman Catholic Church. He was elected on March 13, 2013. He was the first Jesuit Pope as well as the first pope from the Americas and the first from outside Europe in over a millennium.

The Pope, as the head of the Roman Catholic Church, has various roles and responsibilities, including leading the church, making decisions on faith and morality, and representing the church in diplomatic and cultural spheres. Pope Francis was known for his focus on social justice, climate change, and Vatican reform: he was the first pope to welcome gay Catholics into fellowship and put forth that atheists as well as other faiths could get into Heaven.

After Francis is buried, the cardinals will gather at the Vatican and hold a conclave to elect a new pope. While there isn’t any one front-runner, experts on the church have some idea of who could be elected pope. These include:

• Pierbattista Pizzaballa of Italy, who is the cheif cardinal in the Middle East
• Pietro Parolin, the current Vatican Secretary of State who has been a political diplomat for more than two decades
• Fridolin Ambongo, cardinal of the Democratic Republic of Congo–if chosen, he would be the fourth African pope in history and possibly the first black man to be pope
• Luis Antonio Tagle, a liberal-leaning cardinal from the Philippines with similar views as Francis–if chosen, he would be the first pope from East Asia

After eight days of mourning, the Church enters a period of sede vacante, which translates to “the see is vacant” (the see being the pope’s seat at the head of the church). Then every cardinal younger than 80 will gather as a College of Cardinals and elect a new pope. This process typically takes a few weeks and is very secret–the College closes itself off from the outside world entirely and only communicates to the public each day with a smoke signal: black smoke if there’s no pope yet, and white smoke once a pope is chosen.

The Roman Catholic Church is the second-largest religion in the world and the largest denomination of Christianity, representing about 50% of all Christians. In the United States, 20% of adults identify as Catholic, adding their numbers to the roughly 1.39 billion practicing Catholics worldwide.