For centuries, the ritual of the papal conclave — the group of 135 red-robed cardinals who cast their votes for a new pope under Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment — has remained behind locked doors. Their task is monumental: to elect a spiritual leader for over a billion Catholics whose policies could shape everything from global diplomacy to social justice. The decisions made during sequestration are shaped, at least ostensibly, by spiritual will rather than public opinion. But since Pope Francis’s death last month, the College of Cardinals — the pope-appointed inner circle — has been cracked open for a new, unexpected audience: the algorithm.
On the one hand: solemnity, legacy, divine mystery. On the other: fan-cams of favorite cardinals and stan wars over papabile (those considered potential popes), from real to fictional contenders.
Nothing is more responsive than social media, where as soon as something exists, it can be aestheticized, turned into a fandom, and flattened into a TikTok trend. And the conclave — by design — is dripping with iconography and mystique. It’s the kind of visual drama that begs to be screengrabbed, edited, and reinterpreted. Naturally, centuries-old rites are being dissected, memeified, and compared, often irreverently, sometimes unironically, to episodes of The Real Housewives and RuPaul’s Drag Race, and TikTokers are calling for reality-TV cameras to infiltrate the Sistine Chapel.
During the last conclave in 2013, from which Pope Francis emerged, a seagull sat atop the chimney from where the smoke signals (black when a decision has not yet been reached, white once it has) infamously billow. But it was a simpler time online. A single account called Sistine Seagull appeared on what was then known as Twitter, livetweeting the conclave. That seagull walked so The Real Housecardinals of Vatican City could run.
Of course, the 2024 film Conclave helped prime the internet for this moment of Vatican virality. The taut, prestige thriller imagined the secretive inner workings of the Vatican after the pope’s sudden death, depicting the cardinals as complex political players navigating shadowy alliances and moral reckonings. One popular scene shows Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) handing out photocopies of a damning letter, a moment quickly compared to Regina George distributing pages from the Burn Book in Mean Girls. Another features Cardinal Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto) using a red vape that matches his robes, leading to fan-cams set to Charli XCX songs and captions like “Tedesco is brat.”
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It’s this blending of reverence with the performative aspects of internet culture that has made for a participatory spectacle. Take, for instance, the pope fan-cams: “K-pope fan-cams” are trending across TikTok and Instagram, many focused on Cardinal Tagle, a.k.a. “Chito,” a progressive Filipino prelate who could become the first Asian pope. One clip, resurfaced by the conservative Catholic site LifeSite News, shows him singing “Imagine” onstage in front of a crucifix. The post labeled it “shocking,” citing the song’s famously anti-religious lyrics (“No hell below us … no religion too”). But as X’s community notes clarified, Tagle sang a shortened version without those lines. Many commenters shrugged off the controversy, noting how beloved karaoke is in the Philippines — if anything, it made him seem more relatable, more of the people. A cardinal who embraces LGBTQ+ Catholics and knows his way around a mic might just be internet gold.
There are the threads explaining how the voting system works, posts demystifying papal succession, and even movie fan fiction imagining tense alliances and whispered betrayals among the cardinals. Of course, there’s also that AI-generated image of Donald Trump in papal regalia, which he posted on his social-media platforms over the weekend. The image, shared during the mourning period for Pope Francis, drew widespread criticism from communities and Catholic leaders who found it disrespectful.
Perhaps the conclave’s current moment says less about the Catholic Church than it does about our collective relationship to mystery. In an era when everything is available, analyzed, and archived, the conclave remains one of the last true black boxes. Much as we might wish it, there are no cameras inside, no leaks (in theory), and no influencers or commentators narrating the moment in real time. And yet, paradoxically, that absence of information only intensifies the internet’s desire to fill the void.
So, for now, everyone’s watching and everyone’s posting. And when the white smoke finally curls into the Roman sky, millions will refresh their feeds, waiting not just for a new pope but for a new meme.
