Sede Vacante & Conclave 2025
Following the death of Pope Francis on 21 April 2025, the papacy is currently sede vacante.
A conclave to elect a new pope is scheduled to be held starting today in the Sistine Chapel of Vatican City.
Today’s conclave has its roots in the thirteenth century. Following the death of Pope Clement IV on 29 November 1268, the cardinals who had gathered in Viterbo could not agree on who should be the new pope. It took exactly two years, nine months and two days before the new pope, Gregory X, was elected on 1 September 1271, making this election the longest papal election in the history of the Catholic Church.
The new pope was elected more than a year after the magistrates of Viterbo locked the cardinals in, reduced their rations to bread and water, and removed the roof of the Palazzo dei Papi di Viterbo where the election took place.
As a result of the length of the election, during which three of the twenty cardinal-electors died and one resigned, Gregory X decreed during the Second Council of Lyons in 1274 that the cardinal-electors should be locked in seclusion and not permitted to leave until a new pope had been elected.
If you want to know more about the medieval origins of the papal election, the International Medieval Bibliography Online, Bibliographie de Civilisation Médiévale and Lexikon des Mittelalters Online + International Encyclopaedia for the Middle Ages are a good place to start your research.
If you are interested in Gregory X’s papal letters and documents, the database Ut per litteras apostolicas… Papal Letters Online will be useful for your research. Ut per Litteras Apostolicas provides the complete collection of papal letters from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and enables powerful software searches.
Of course, we cannot talk about the subject of the pope and leave out the Index Religiosus, an internationally renowned bibliography of academic publications in the fields of theology, religious sciences, and Church history. With more than 4,500 hits for the index term Papacy, the Index Religiosus not only covers the medieval period, but the entire history of the Roman Catholic Church.
