White smoke poured from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel and the great bells of St. Peter’s Basilica tolled Thursday after cardinals elected the 267th pope to lead the Catholic Church on the second day of their conclave.

With all the pomp, drama and solemnity that the Catholic Church can muster, 133 cardinals on Wednesday began the secretive, centuries-old ritual to elect a successor to Pope Francis.

They don’t have a vote in the pope’s election, but nearly 900 superiors of the world’s female Catholic orders met in Rome on Monday to chart a course forward, a few miles from where cardinals will gather in a conclave to choose a successor to Pope Francis.

The United States is the home country for 10 of the 133 cardinals eligible to vote for the next pope. That’s more than any nation except Italy, home to 17 of the electors who will gather Wednesday for the Vatican conclave to choose the successor to Pope Francis.

Pope Francis will be laid to rest Saturday after lying in state for three days in St. Peter’s Basilica, where the faithful are expected to flock to pay their respects to history’s first Latin American pontiff.

“We’re certainly going to mourn the loss of a truly wonderful leader, someone who was a great example, who lived their faith in word and action,” Auxiliary Bishop Lawrence Sullivan said. “But it’s also a time to really be grateful for his phenomenal leadership.”

Anyone trying to handicap the outcome should remember that Jorge Mario Bergoglio was considered too old to be elected pope in 2013 at age 76, and that Karol Wojtyla wasn’t on any front-runner lists going into the 1978 conclave that elected him Pope John Paul II.

Cardinal Blase Cupich, the Archbishop of Chicago, has released a statement on the death of Pope Francis.

Pope Francis, history’s first Latin American pontiff who charmed the world with his humble style and concern for the poor but alienated conservatives with critiques of capitalism and climate change, died Monday. He was 88.

Pope Francis made the comments during an appearance at an evening talk show, and then followed up Monday with an official telegram of congratulations to Trump on the day of his inauguration. Francis said he prayed that America would live up to its ideals of being a “land of opportunity and welcome for all.”

In a foreign policy address to ambassadors accredited to the Holy See, Pope Francis lamented that 2024 had dawned at a time in which peace is “increasingly threatened, weakened and in some part lost.”

Benedict XVI is considered one of the 20th century’s greatest theologians and spent his lifetime upholding church doctrine. But he will go down in history for a singular, revolutionary act that changed the future of the papacy: He retired, the first pope in six centuries to do so.

John Kerry, President Joe Biden’s climate envoy, met privately with Pope Francis on Saturday, afterward calling the pope a “compelling moral authority on the subject of the climate crisis” who has been “ahead of the curve.”

Pope Francis elevated Blase Cupich, along with 16 other archbishops, to the College of Cardinals on Saturday. But that’s not the only news the pope made. 

Faced with major, ongoing financial pressure, the Archdiocese of Chicago is looking hard at its mission and membership. Archbishop Blase Cupich talks about the Chicago Catholic Church's money woes and how it might reorganize and revitalize itself.

The famous painting had been on loan to Florence's Palazzo Strozzi since September. In November, the painting moved briefly to the Vatican for a visit with Pope Francis, who had declared it to be one of his favorites.