I arrived in Rome Sunday morning to a city still mourning the death of Pope Francis. My taxi from the Termini train station took me past a video billboard spanning half the façade of a downtown building that proclaimed, “ROME EMBRACES POPE FRANCIS WITH LOVE.”

People continue to wait in line for hours to get inside the Basilica of St. Mary Maggiore to briefly stand before the simple tomb of Francis.

A few hours before I took a post-dinner stroll to St. Peter’s Square, the cardinals currently in Rome—including most of the 133 eligible cardinal electors who are expected to vote in the conclave set to start Wednesday, May 7—were in St. Peter’s Basilica. There, they celebrated the ninth and final memorial mass of the Novendiali, the nine days of mourning for the death of a pope that began on April 26.

And late into Sunday night, St. Peter’s Square was filled with at least as many visitors as the throngs who came to behold the Vatican Nativity scene and Christmas tree when our Baptist-Catholic international ecumenical dialogue joint commission met in Rome. Rome is also gearing up for the comparatively infrequent occurrence of what is arguably the world’s oldest continuously utilized method for selecting the new leader of a large organization.

Vatican firefighters have installed the temporary chimney on the roof of the Sistine Chapel. Color-coded smoke will issue from the chimney that will communicate to the world the outcome of the voting of the cardinals sealed off from the world: black smoke after a round of voting that fails to achieve the minimum of at least two-thirds of the cardinal electors voting for a single candidate, and white smoke when a round of voting has finally elected a pope.

Hotel vacancies, already a scarce commodity in Rome due to the Jubilee Year that has drawn pilgrims to Rome from around the world, are now almost nonexistent thanks to the influx of thousands of journalists with temporary accreditation from the Holy See Press Office for covering the papal conclave. I’m grateful for the hospitality of the Chiesa Evangelica Battistadi via del Teatro Valle, the Baptist church in the center of Rome, which made available to me a guest room in the church only a mile’s walk from St. Peter’s Basilica. 

When I arrived, pastor Simone Caccamo took me straight to the after-worship church meal in time for the soup course. I enjoyed a delightful lunch conversation with a Finnish Lutheran doctoral student doing dissertation research in Rome and his friend from Finland, who had come to visit him in Rome after a few days spent rock climbing in the Italian Alps.

Before dinner on Sunday, I walked by the Domus Internationalis Paulus VI, a guest house for Catholic clergy visiting Rome. It was there that Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio stayed ahead of the 2013 conclave, and he famously returned after the conclave as Pope Francis to pay his hotel bill.

I’ve stayed there whenever our Baptist-Catholic dialogue has met in Rome. I was interested in seeing whether there were any signs of cardinals staying there ahead of the conclave. There weren’t any clerical comings or goings during my brief observation period. However, this was likely because the cardinals would have been wrapping up their final memorial mass at St. Peter’s Basilica around that time.

In addition to the daily memorial masses of the Novendiali, the cardinals in Rome have been assembling in daily congregations to hear from one another about their sense of the current state of the Catholic Church and concerns about its future. These congregations continue beyond the Novendiali until the day before the conclave begins. In a future dispatch, I will share some information about what has occurred in the daily congregations.

I look forward to providing Good Faith Media readers with reporting and commentary over the next few days. How many days will that be? 

Modern conclaves (twentieth-century through present) have been concluded within four days, and the past two have extended only two days. Some analysts have suggested that this one may last longer for two reasons.

First, there are more cardinal electors than in previous conclaves—135 instead of 120. However, there are expected to be 133 in light of announcements by two cardinal electors that they will be unable to travel to Rome for health reasons. Second, the intentionality of Pope Francis in diversifying the College of Cardinals globally means that many cardinals do not know each other.

Some observers of the Catholic Church, though, have pointed out that the opposite may be true: the three-year Synod on Synodality convened by Pope Francis has allowed many additional opportunities for the cardinals to come together, observe one another in action, and get to know each other informally. That may make the election of a candidate by the requisite two-thirds majority a swifter process than might have been the case apart from this synodal process. (I will write more about the significance of the Synod on Synodality for this conclave in another dispatch.)

While I certainly hope readers will follow my reporting and commentary on Good Faith Media’s website and social media accounts, I want to commend another source of information that will help make sense of the conclave. I’m seeking to function as an explainer of the conclave to my fellow Baptists and others in the larger free church tradition. However, an excellent and accessible source of insider Catholic conclave news, summary, and analysis is “Inside the Vatican,” the conclave podcast of a Jesuit-related America magazine from which I’ve been learning much.

One of the co-hosts, America magazine associate editor Colleen Dulle, provides brief synopses of significant developments and answers followers’ questions on her social media accounts, which I recommend following over the next few days.

More to come from Rome here at Good Faith Media. Stay tuned!

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Professor of Historical Theology at Gardner-Webb University. Harmon is serving as a GFM correspondent for the papal conclave in Rome.