Agencies Vatican City

Cardinal Kevin Farrell remembers the day Pope Francis asked him to be the camerlengo, the Vatican official who runs the Holy See after the death of one pope and before the election of another. They were flying back to Rome from the 2019 World Youth Day in Panama, and Francis popped the question in business class. Farrell, 77, had been in Rome only a few years, summoned out of the blue from his job as bishop of Dallas, Texas, to reorganize the Vatican's laity office, a key part of Francis' reforms.

Three years into the job, Francis asked him to take on another role that is steeped in myth and mystery but also has real-world responsibilities: managing the Vatican as "camerlengo" - or chamberlain - during the often traumatic "interregnum" between papacies and helping to organise the conclave to elect the next pontiff.

"I said to him I would accept the position but on one condition," Farrell recalled in a 2022 interview, smiling as he remembered their airborne conversation. The condition was that the pope would have to preach at Farrell's own funeral, reflecting Farrell's hope that he would die before Francis and never have to act as a camerlengo.

The joke was twofold: Farrell didn't particularly want the heavy responsibility. But more personally, he didn't want to entertain the possibility of outliving Francis, whom he credited with having set the Catholic Church on a crucial path of renewal, redirecting it away from culture war defensiveness and back to its Gospel-driven essence of inclusion.