To be honest, I was not an admirer of his papacy. He struck me as a shallow man, enacting the will of the faction that elected him, and doing no good at all for urgent issues such as the sex abuse and financial corruption scandals in the Church. But too many of the Pope’s detractors tended to talk as though he were some kind of uniquely bad prelate who came out of nowhere, or whom perhaps his electors had summoned from the Plane of Torment. In actuality, “Papa Bergoglio” was a symptom rather than a cause of the problems in the Church. His poor formation as a priest and repeated promotions beyond his level of competence were due to bad administrative and pastoral decisions, going back generations, by previous popes and the Church hierarchy. Somehow, his critics tend to be unwilling to address that.

In any case, please pray for the repose of his soul, if you are the praying kind. If you are the kind who obsesses about papal conclaves, this website tries to provide a relatively neutral guide (although the webmaster’s own preferences are plain enough) to the current cardinals and their stances on certain hot-button issues. Also, this news article from The Pillar offers a pretty clear view of the procedural stuff related to the passing of the Pope and what comes afterwards.