Instead, grief-stricken Argentines noted what many considered a deeply personal loss before altars, with flowers, hand-scrawled messages and eclectic tokens of affection.

“I remember he was a good person, very humble. He always thought of the poor, always,” said Susana Perez, 67, at the Basílica de San José de Flores, a church just blocks away from Francis’s childhood home in Buenos Aires, the capital.

Condolences poured in from all political and religious corners, and reflections dominated local radio stations and television. Even as they paid tribute, some Argentines said they had hoped Francis would have returned to Argentina after he was elected pope.

Still, President Javier Milei declared seven days of mourning and midafternoon masses of remembrance were quickly scheduled. At the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Cathedral, schoolchildren talked about the pope’s death during a tour.

Before becoming pope, Francis’ pastoral work in Buenos Aires was defined by his commitment and involvement with the city’s poorer neighborhoods. As a result, many felt a personal connection to Francis and shared stories of their encounters with him.

Ms. Perez said she knew the pope before he became pontiff because he offered Mass on the street near her Buenos Aires home once a month. “He helped a lot in the soup kitchens, often donating money from his own pocket,” she said.

Francis also left a mark on Matilde Dolores’ life. “I knew him. He gave me my Confirmation,” said Ms Dolores, 82, and a retired nurse. She was at the Basilica de San Jose de Flores wearing dark sunglasses, on a mission to pray for him.

“He was such a kind priest,” she said as she broke down in tears. “When he led the Mass, he always spoke up for the needy.”

At the cathedral mourners lined up to take photos of a framed photograph of the pope before a gilded altar. It was flanked by a papal tiara and a giant staff, meant to symbolize his pastoral work. In a notebook, they scrawled messages of condolences.

“He was just different,” said Diana Pallais, 56, a Nicaraguan who works for a software company, and was visiting Buenos Aires this week. “He believed we needed to understand each other and build bridges with gay people, with poor people, with immigrants. People who are being attacked by world leaders today.”

Norberto Rodríguez, 59, gripped a photo of Pope Francis that he had found on Facebook, printed and brought to the cathedral. He walked along the pews, extending the framed photograph so others could kiss it.

Mr. Rodríguez, 59, said he met the pope many years ago, before he became pontiff, after he delivered an outdoor Mass in a gritty part of Buenos Aires. He was living on the street at the time, lost and seeking direction.

“I gave him my hand,” he said. “He told me to follow God. That there may be bad times, but that you’re never alone.”

Camila de la Cruz, a 26-year-old studying to become a kindergarten teacher, brought two offerings for Francis to the cathedral: a rosary and stamps from San Lorenzo soccer club.

“He was a fan of San Lorenzo — the club was his home,” she said.

Even after becoming pope, Ms. De la Cruz said, he remained humble — always caring for the less privileged and preaching empathy. “He kept all of us in mind,” she said. “He never forgot Argentina. He never stopped praying for his country and his beloved San Lorenzo.”

Among Argentines, there were also those who criticized the pope for expressing views about Argentine society, including a rise in poverty, that many regarded as showing sympathy for left-leaning administrations.

“I think that because of his position he should have been more neutral,” said German Zabala, 42, an Uber driver. Still, “it’s a great loss,” he said, lamenting, like many other Argentines, that the pope never made it back to his native soil.

“It would have been a revolution for us,” Mr. Zabala said, “because we were waiting for him.”

“What he did for the L.G.B.T.Q. community is more than all of his predecessors combined,” said the Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit writer and high-profile proponent of a more inclusive church.

“Just acknowledging them, recognizing them, accompanying them, advocating for them, listening to them,” he said. “He was the first pope to ever use the word gay publicly, and he met regularly with transgender Catholics, even toward the end of his life. No pope has ever done that.”

Sexuality was one of many issues in which Catholic conservatives disagreed with Pope Francis, and it contributed to the emergence of an influential and well-organized conservative opposition to his papacy in the United States. But in other countries, especially those where homosexuality is more widely stigmatized, some saw Francis’ accepting attitude as a breath of fresh air.

Brain Mboh, 28, said he appreciated that Pope Francis had “consistently stated” that homosexuality was not a crime, which was a powerful message in Mr. Mboh’s native Cameroon, where homosexuality is illegal.

But Francis’ change in tone did not reflect a deeper reconsideration of church doctrine, and his record on L.G.B.T.Q. issues included perhaps as many traditional retrenchments as it did pastoral leaps forward.

He allowed priests to bless gay couples, but he also reaffirmed church teaching that marriage could only be between a man and a woman. He used a slur for gay men when he complained about the number of gay seminarians to a group of 250 bishops in Rome, then apologized when the incident was reported in the news media. He then repeated the church’s instruction that men with “deep-seated homosexual tendencies” should not enter the priesthood.

Francis DeBernardo, the executive director of New Ways Ministry, which presses for greater inclusion of L.G.B.T.Q. people in the church, said he thought Francis “knew that the whole church was not ready yet for full acceptance of L.G.B.T.Q. people.”

“The Catholic Church is a big ship to turn — it takes a long, long time,” he said. “He was very concerned with keeping the church together, and that is why he sort of stopped at that first step of dialogue and learning and being welcoming, before making any substantial doctrinal changes.”

Mr. DeBernardo said he also thought it was important to remember that Pope Francis, who was born in 1936, “was also a man of his time.”

“For someone who is 88 years old, and who grew up in an institution that was as homophobic as the Catholic Church was in those times, that he was able to make the changes he did is really remarkable,” Mr. DeBernardo said.

Father Martin, whose support for L.G.B.T.Q. ministry has made him a lightning rod for conservative criticism in the United States, met with the pope after he publicly apologized for the episode involving the gay slur.

He said they had “a challenging conversation,” but he thought the outcome illustrated the pope’s openness and humility.

“A couple of days later I met him again at a public event, and he said, ‘Thank you for that conversation. I really needed that,’” Father Martin said. “And I thought, ‘What kind of a person thanks someone for a challenging conversation?’ This was a person who was open to meeting with people, engaging with them and changing his mind.”

Eugene Ndi Ndi contributed reporting from Cameroon.

Francis also visited St. Mary Major every time he returned to the Vatican after a hospital stay, including on March 23, when he left Gemelli Hospital after a 38-day stay. On that occasion, he did not get out of the car.

In his will, Francis specified that “the tomb must be in the earth; simple, without particular decoration.” He asked that the tomb be placed in the aisle next to the Pauline Chapel, where an important Marian icon, the Salus Populi Romani, is located.

Francis said that in being buried there, he wanted to thank the Virgin “for her docile and maternal care.”

Tradition holds that the icon was made by Saint Luke the Evangelist, the patron saint of painters. It is an image Francis was particularly devoted to, continuing a Jesuit tradition. According to the basilica’s website, since the Jesuit order was founded, Jesuits have “fostered devotion to the icon” by distributing copies of the icon throughout the world.”

Francis first revealed in 2023 during an interview for a Mexican TV program that he wanted to be buried at St. Mary Major. In the program, he said he wanted to be laid to rest there “because of my great devotion.”

On Monday, the Vatican also released Francis’ death certificate, which said he died at 7:35 a.m. Monday local time of a cerebral stroke that caused a coma and “irreversible” cardiac arrest.

Prof. Andrea Arcangeli, the director of the Vatican’s health offices, wrote that the pope had arterial hypertension, multiple bronchiectasis and Type II diabetes, and that he had been affected by episodes of acute respiratory failure. These took place when he was in the hospital with pneumonia in both lungs.

The date that Francis signed his will is the feast day of Sts. Peter and Paul and a holiday in Rome. He says in the document that he had written it “sensing that the sunset of my earthly life is approaching with lively hope in eternal life.” He made reference to “the suffering that has been present in the last part of my life.” A year earlier, he had undergone colon surgery, the first time he was admitted to Gemelli Hospital.

In closing his will, Francis asked God to “give the deserved reward to those who loved me and will continue to pray for me,” echoing a refrain that closed many of his addresses.

Cardinal Bergoglio, who took the name Pope Francis, the first to do so in the history of the church, was a pope of surprises. Over the dozen years I covered him, from the day of his election to the day of his death on Monday, he kept the church he led, the world he cared so much about and the reporters who followed him on their toes. I covered him in unexpected destinations — Mongolia, Iraq, Myanmar — where he drew attention to humanitarian plights that were off the global radar.

One indelible image for me in my years covering Pope Francis was seeing him visibly moved, his voice tight, as he came face to face in Bangladesh with members of the Rohingya ethnic minority who had suffered enormous persecution. For me, that hammered home how much Francis cared about the plight of migrants, the displaced victims of war and the most forgotten and marginalized among us, no matter their religion. For him, their suffering was real.

On the papal plane, he was an easygoing guy with a good sense of humor, better at glad-handing the press than all of the presidential candidates and presidents I had covered. In the Vatican, he surprised me with a governing style that his critics considered so tough as to be authoritarian and an ability to get around the traps of an institution built to slow things down. At other times, he stunned me with his apparent indecision, punting important decisions, like allowing some older, married men to serve as priests in remote locations.

In short, Francis was never predictable.

But Pope Francis and President Trump disagreed over far more than style. By the time they met at the Vatican in 2017, the vast differences in their priorities and worldviews were clear.

Both rose to global prominence during the same decade of rapid political and societal change, as war, poverty and climate change disrupted nations and sent millions of migrants across the globe. And both leveraged their personal charisma to flex their power in transformative ways, remaking the Catholic church and American politics in their own outsider images.

Yet the relationship between the two was defined by the chasm between them, frequently bursting into public view in extraordinary clashes that revealed radically opposing visions of how to lead, and of what kind of world they hoped to create.

Until the pope’s final day, the two leaders had been tangling over immigration, an issue both saw as crucial to their mission and legacy.

Mr. Trump twice won the White House on promises to halt illegal border crossings, blaming undocumented immigrants for crime, economic malaise and terrorism.

Pope Francis believed that Christian love required compassionate care for migrants, and that Mr. Trump’s agenda of mass deportation violated the “dignity of many men and women, and of entire families.”

His first papal trip, in 2013, had been to the island of Lampedusa, a Mediterranean gateway to Europe for asylum seekers, to draw attention to the humanitarian crisis he felt the world was ignoring.

During the 2016 election, the pope criticized Mr. Trump’s pledge to build a wall on the United States’ border with Mexico, saying it suggested that the Republican candidate was “not Christian.”

“A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian,” Pope Francis said as he flew back to Rome from Mexico hours after celebrating a 200,000-person Mass in Ciudad Juárez.

Mr. Trump shot back, calling the Pope’s comments “disgraceful” and saying, through a campaign statement, that if the Vatican were ever “attacked by ISIS,” the pope “would have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been President.”

Representative Brendan Boyle, a Pennsylvania Democrat and observant Catholic, said the Pope’s early criticism of Mr. Trump had created the “completely unprecedented circumstance” of a pontiff who had openly excoriated an American president and a president who had been eager to return the fire.

“The fact that Trump, unlike previous presidents — Democrats and Republicans — was so vitriolically against immigration, and would use, and continues to use, really insulting rhetoric about immigrants, prompted this pope to speak out in a way that you didn’t see earlier,” said Mr. Boyle, who attended Pope Francis’s address to Congress in 2015.

On Monday, unlike other world leaders, who offered grateful and glowing testimonials to the pope, Mr. Trump offered a terse tribute on social media. “Rest in Peace Pope Francis!” he wrote on Truth Social. “May God Bless him and all who loved him!”

Mr. Trump also addressed the pope’s death in brief remarks later on Monday morning before the White House Easter Egg Roll.

“He loved the world, and he especially loved people that were having a hard time — and that’s good with me,” Mr. Trump said, announcing that he was ordering flags at the White House and federal and military facilities to be flown at half-staff.

Asked if he agreed with the pope’s tolerance toward migrants, Mr. Trump said, “Yeah, I do.” But moments later, in response to a question about a legal case over his administration’s deportation of Venezuelan migrants, Trump railed against the “millions and millions” of migrants who have entered the United States.

After Mr. Trump’s first election, the two met — for the only time — at the Vatican in 2017. The photos quickly went viral. Standing side by side, the president smiled broadly as the pope appeared stern.

The Pope gave the president, a known skeptic of climate change, a set of English-language translations of his papal writings, including a 2015 encyclical on climate change.

Mr. Trump, seemingly star-struck, told reporters: “He is something. We had a fantastic meeting.”

But in 2018, Pope Francis condemned Mr. Trump’s separation of migrant children from their parents at the border with Mexico, calling the policy “immoral” and “contrary to our Catholic values.”

And in 2019, in another criticism of Mr. Trump’s immigration policy, the pope warned that those who close borders “will become prisoners of the walls that they build.”

The pope’s tone with Mr. Trump was markedly different from the one he had struck with former President Barack Obama, whose White House he visited and with whose goals he was often aligned, on issues including an easing of tensions with Cuba and the Iran nuclear deal.

The Obama-Francis relationship had symbolized what many liberals believed was the coming of a progressive era on the world stage.

“There was a meeting of minds,” said John Kerry, Mr. Obama’s secretary of state, who met repeatedly with Pope Francis. “The pope had enormous admiration for President Obama’s journey and what he represented and his efforts as a peacemaker.”

That sense of overlapping missions allowed Democrats to claim the pope as one of their own — even if they didn’t agree on every issue, including abortion rights and same-sex marriage. But it also set the stage for Republican backlash and for the conflict with Mr. Trump, who aggressively courted disgruntled conservative Catholics.

“For Donald Trump, Pope Francis looked like an enemy because he’s been friendly with Obama and with Biden,” said Steven P. Millies, the director of the Bernardin Center at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago and an expert on the Catholic church’s relationship to politics. “There was not going to be much chance of a personal relationship between Pope Francis and Donald Trump. What we can call personal tensions have been visible very publicly.”

Indeed, after Joseph R. Biden Jr. won the White House, becoming America’s second Catholic president, the Pope called him “to tell me how much he appreciated the fact that I would focus on the poor and focus on the needs of people who are in trouble,” Mr. Biden later recounted.

And in a visit to the Vatican in 2021, after U.S. bishops had advanced a proposal that would deny Mr. Biden communion for his support of abortion rights, Mr. Biden said the pope had told him that he was happy that Mr. Biden was a “good Catholic.”

By contrast, when Mr. Biden decided to not seek re-election in 2024 and Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee, the pope advised Catholic voters to choose the “lesser of two evils” because “both are against life” — Ms. Harris for her support for abortion rights, and Mr. Trump for closing the door to immigrants.

“Sending migrants away, not allowing them to grow, not letting them have life is something wrong; it is cruelty,” Francis said. “Sending a child away from the womb of the mother is murder because there is life. And we must speak clearly about these things.”

Mr. Trump’s re-election in November again put the two leaders’ starkly contrasting values in opposition. As Mr. Trump promised to elevate conservative Christian values in America, Pope Francis, whom Catholics view as God’s representative on earth, escalated his criticism.

In January, the pope said in an interview on Italian television that it would be a “disgrace” if Mr. Trump went forward with plans to intensify immigration enforcement. In February, the pope issued an unusual open letter to America’s Catholic bishops denouncing mass deportations and predicting that the policy would “end badly.”

“I exhort all the faithful of the Catholic Church,” he wrote, “not to give in to narratives that discriminate against and cause unnecessary suffering to our migrant and refugee brothers and sisters.”

The letter, written just days before the pope was hospitalized, also offered an apparent rebuttal to Vice President JD Vance’s interpretation of a Catholic teaching that he had used to defend the administration’s deportation policies.

Still, in the final hours of his life, the pope briefly welcomed Mr. Vance, a Catholic convert, into his residence for an Easter greeting. Soon after, he went to the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica, where an aide read aloud what would be the pontiff’s final public message.

“How much contempt is stirred up at times towards the vulnerable, the marginalized, and migrants!” he said.

“After we heard the brutal news, we thought, ‘We have to come here,’” said Mauro Cappelli, standing with family in the shadow of the basilica, a short distance from their home.

The massive church stands on the outskirts of one of Rome’s most populous neighborhoods and halfway across the city from St. Peter’s Square.

Under bright blue skies, pilgrims — including large tour groups led by flag-holding guides — streamed into the basilica. Some visitors posed for pictures upon crossing the threshold of the basilica’s holy door, newly opened for the Roman Catholic Church Jubilee.

Inside, a trio of older Italians reflected on Francis’ passing. Like all those interviewed, they spoke in Italian.

“Even if it was foreseeable, it was still a shock,” said Pasquale Di Tardo. He had traveled to Rome from Bari, in Italy’s southern Puglia region, for the Easter weekend accompanied by his wife, Rosa Rita Porro. Mr. Di Tardo said he had watched Francis grow increasingly frail in recent years, and a kind of bond inside him strengthened.

“It’s a shame,” Mr. Di Tardo said about the pontiff’s death at 88.

Maria Puma of Rome, the couple’s friend, looked down and quietly said she was still processing Francis’ death and his legacy. “He has started his eternal life,” she said. Romans don’t always agree with their bishop, and she added, “Sometimes, I had my criticisms.”

But on this day of mourning, the Romans seemed to draw strength from the memory of Francis’ unyielding commitment to tolerance and equality.

“He was such a strong figure, a man of peace,” said Mr. Cappelli’s wife, Maria Antonini, standing next to her husband.

Several said that they had found inspiration in his messages of social justice, especially as his words stood in sharp contrast to the more hard-nosed rhetoric common with today’s world leaders.

“We can only hope he has opened a door to a better future,” Mr. Cappelli said.

In 2015, he penned the first-ever papal encyclical focused solely on the environment. In “Laudato Si,” a sprawling call to action, the pope recognized climate change as both a social and environmental crisis, and emphasized that its greatest consequences were shouldered by the poor.

That year, when 195 nations agreed to the landmark Paris Agreement, a global pact against climate change, at least 10 world leaders made specific reference to the pope’s words during their addresses to the United Nations climate conference.

“Before Pope Francis, climate change was seen either as a political issue or a scientific issue. What his encyclical did was frame it as a spiritual issue,” said Father James Martin, a Jesuit priest and the editor at large of America Media, a media company with a Catholic perspective.

“He really started from the standpoint that God had created the universe, had created the world and that this was a responsibility of ours — to care for it,” Father Martin said.

With its publication, “Laudato Si” became a permanent part of official church teaching. It was one of four encyclicals penned during Francis’ tenure. In it, he clearly laid out the consequences of climate change, from loss of biodiversity to water scarcity and the breakdown of society.

“He noted in ‘Laudato Si’ that while humans were creating ‘an immense pile of filth,’ we also had the ability to change course and ‘sing as we go,’” meaning that the struggle should not take away the joy of hope, said Dan Misleh, the founder and executive director of the Catholic Climate Covenant, a U.S. organization.

“He was wide-eyed about the challenge but also encouraged us to be hopeful for the future,” Mr. Misleh said.

Mauricio López Oropeza, a rector and lay vice president of the Amazon Ecclesial Network, who contributed to “Laudato Si,” said the statement reaffirmed that many Catholics were already committed to environmental issues.

Others were unconvinced. “I have to say that for the general membership of the church, this was not very well received, and was actually contested in many places,” Mr. López Oropeza said.

“Many people resented him framing what they saw as a political issue into a spiritual one,” said Father Martin, who consulted on parts of “Laudato Si.”

In a follow-up to “Laudato Si” published in 2023, Francis again implored the world to take action. “Once and for all, let us put an end to the irresponsible derision that would present this issue as something purely ecological, ‘green,’ romantic, frequently subject to ridicule by economic interest,” he wrote.

In the exhortation, known as “Laudate Deum,” Francis specifically called out the United States, pointing out that its per-person emissions were twice those of China, and seven times those of the average in the world’s poorest countries. He called for a broad change in the “irresponsible lifestyle connected with the Western model.”

Francis saw cooperation among governments as key to addressing climate change, and during his time as pope, the Vatican hosted conferences with mayors, religious leaders, money managers and oil companies to find solutions.

The teachings of “Laudato Si” have reverberated with Catholics worldwide. Several Catholic institutions divested from fossil fuels in the years after its publication.

One of the most significant expressions of “Laudato Si” has been the church’s work in the Amazon basin, said Mr. López Oropeza, who has worked in the region for 12 years.

But the real-world impact of Francis’ climate leadership was “not enough,” as Mr. Misleh, of Catholic Climate Covenant, put it. Since the publication of “Laudato Si,” global emissions have continued to rise, which Mr. Misleh said he blames in part on general apathy, especially by people in wealthy nations.

Tributes poured in from global climate leaders on Monday morning. “He was deeply involved in trying to figure out how we move on the inequities that come from the climate crisis,” said John Kerry, who served as President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s special envoy for climate, calling Francis “a humanitarian more than anything.”

In a Substack post on Monday, Bill McKibben, a prominent author and climate activist, called Francis “perhaps the world’s greatest environmental champion.”

Mr. López Oropeza said he thought Francis’ climate leadership should be one of the “essential legacies” of his papacy.

“This is one of the most pressing challenges of our time,” he said, adding that it most affected “impoverished communities, and if we don’t respond now, it will be too late.”

For his supporters, decentralization brought the prospect of change that they had thirsted for over decades. For those who favored Vatican control, it was a nightmare.

When it came to the so-called Liturgy Wars over how adherents should pray, and which especially in the English-speaking world had long divided liberals and conservatives, he empowered local bishops to translate liturgical language as they saw fit.

He used his appointment powers to make his vision lasting.

He replaced conservatives with allies at the Vatican’s Congregation of Bishops, which selects local church leaders. In choosing bishops, he was said to pick pastors over managers, street priests over power brokers. He preferred bishops closer to the people than those near the business-friendly Catholic group Opus Dei.

In the College of Cardinals, where a two-thirds majority of those under 80 will elect his successor, he appointed more than half its voters. He made the college less white (appointing the first African American cardinal), less Italian and less representative of the Roman curia.

Relying less on Europe, which he called “aged,” or America’s traditional feeder cities, like Philadelphia, he chose cardinals from nations with increasingly popular Pentecostal and evangelical movements in Latin America, Asia and Africa, the most fertile ground for Catholic growth and for priests, who are disappearing from Catholicism’s historic centers in Europe.

“You are important,” he told young Catholics in Mozambique in 2019. “Not only are you the future of Mozambique, or of the church and of humanity. You are their present.”

While he pushed for a decentralized church, Francis also created a sounding board of nine trusted cardinals with extraordinary influence, including the authority to rewrite the Vatican’s constitution.

And in a stark departure from the three decades of church leadership before him, he sought to revive the more open spirit of the Second Vatican Council.

In key positions, he brought the ax down hard. In July 2017, Francis essentially fired the church’s top doctrinal watchdog, the conservative Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, by refusing to extend his term at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Francis folded the Pontifical Academy for Life, a headquarters for anti-abortion culture warriors, into a new umbrella department for Laity, Family and Life, which also opposed the death penalty. In 2018, capital punishment officially became contrary to church teaching.

Also that year, he put caring for migrants and the poor on an equal footing with opposition to abortion in the apostolic exhortation, “Rejoice and Be Glad.” Welcoming the stranger at the door is fundamental to the faith, he said, “not a notion invented by some pope, or a momentary fad.”

Losing him on Monday was heartbreaking, said Chris Nealon, who stopped to pray at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York at the end of his shift at a security job.

“We are all made in God’s image, and he reinforced that,” said Mr. Nealon, a Navy veteran and former police officer. He praised Francis’ calls to end anti-gay sentiments and push to promote world peace.

During Mass on Sunday, many Catholics had kept the ailing pope in their prayers, Isabella Colon, 25, said as she stopped at Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago on her way to work Monday morning.

“He spoke up for the kids in Gaza,” she said. “He did a lot for people around the world, and a lot of people look up to him, and it’s really sad.”

The 7 a.m. Mass at Holy Name was celebrated by the Rev. Ramil Fajardo, the resident priest, who said it was “hard to find the appropriate words” to commemorate Francis following “the glow” of Easter, the most important day of the Christian calendar.

“Although we are sad and it’s still raw, we still are shocked and words might escape us,” Father Fajardo said. “On the other hand, our liturgy tells us that Jesus Christ has risen, and there is no fear.”

Francis promoted interfaith relations, and his popularity in the United States extended beyond Catholics, including to liberal Protestants who saw him as a moral guide.

“I like the man very much,” Olga Helmprecht said as she walked slowly out of St. Patrick’s, sniffling and wiping her eyes and nose with a tissue.

Ms. Helmprecht, a practicing Protestant, said she took two buses and a train from Long Island so that she could pay her respects to the pontiff.

“He was so honest and not so old-fashioned,” she said. “He tried to understand.”

The end of Francis’ life and papacy resonated deeply with immigrants who were grateful for his defense of migrants, including in his final address. In written remarks read on Sunday by a Vatican aide, the pope urged Catholics to “revive our trust in others, including those who are different than ourselves, or who come from distant lands.”

Ana Padilla, who immigrated to the United States from Peru more than 30 years ago, stopped in front of a statue of Mary holding Jesus at St. Patrick’s on Monday morning. She shut her eyes to pray.

The mere fact that Francis, an Argentine who was the first Latin American pope, spoke Spanish meant a lot to her, she said. But what she most appreciated were his messages about putting family first, and his advocacy to be kind to migrants.

“Everything he did was different,” she said, noting that Francis preferred to reside in a Vatican guesthouse. “He didn’t stay in the same house all of the other popes lived in. He wanted to live in humility.”

Several Catholic Americans said they hoped the next pontiff would follow Francis’s lead.

“I would like for him to be progressive,” said Amy Ramirez, 75, who attended early Mass at Holy Name in Chicago. “Someone who stands up for not just Catholics but all religions, for fairness and justice for all people.”

The film, which made $115 million at the global box office, offers a glimpse inside a process that in real life takes place under strict security measures to ensure confidentiality. The movie was “quite accurate, save for a few things,” said Dr. Kurt Martens, a professor of canon law at the Catholic University of America.

“Conclave” has been widely celebrated, receiving top prizes at both the Screen Actors Guild Awards and the EE British Academy Film Awards, and winning the Academy Award for adapted screenplay.

Here’s what happens in the film (caution: minor spoilers ahead) and what papal experts say is accurate about it.

What’s the movie “Conclave” about?

The film opens with the death of an unnamed fictional pope and follows the process and drama of a papal election.

It stars Ralph Fiennes as Cardinal Thomas Lawrence, the dean of the College of Cardinals, with Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Lucian Msamati and Sergio Castellitto playing top papal contenders.

The film follows the cardinals through numerous voting sessions, meals in a shared cafeteria and the rooms in the papal palace where they are sequestered.

While many experts have lauded the film as one of the more accurate depictions of the conclave, Piotr H. Kosicki, an associate professor of history at the University of Maryland, cautioned that “on some level, very few people outside the College of Cardinals can really speak to the reality” of what takes place behind closed doors.

What rituals and voting processes are depicted?

Many of the rituals in the film — the prayers being said, the burning of the ballots, a needle being woven through the ballots — are “more or less correct,” Dr. Kosicki said.

During the voting process, each cardinal writes the name of one person on a rectangular ballot. Votes are announced aloud one by one and each ballot is threaded with a single needle before being burned. If a two-thirds consensus has not been reached, the smoke emitted from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel appears black.

Four rounds of voting are permitted daily. When a pope has been chosen by a two-thirds majority, the smoke from the chimney is white.

However, some rituals depicted in the film take place in a mix of English and Spanish. In reality, “prayer in the Vatican is in Italian or in Latin, period,” Dr. Kosicki said.

Is the politicking really that cutthroat?

While it is hard to say exactly what goes on within the confines of the conclave, electing a pope is like electing a head of state, said Massimo Faggioli, a professor of history at Villanova University.

The politicking begins in earnest after the pope has died during what is called sede vacante, the period when the seat is vacant. Some cardinals agree to news media interviews to raise their profiles or those of others. Groups gather for formal and informal conversations, and there are general congregations where all cardinals discuss the state of the church, as well as potential successors.

“This time, I think it’s an open conclave, meaning that there’s no natural successor, or not a cardinal who is clearly the favorite,” Dr. Faggioli said.

Is it common for the cardinals to go multiple rounds without reaching a decision?

The word conclave is derived from the Latin words com, meaning “together” and clavis, meaning “key,” and the process was created in the early Middle Ages to ensure that a new pope could be chosen quickly. Cardinals swear an oath of secrecy and are not allowed to leave the area of the conclave until a new pope is chosen, except for some rare circumstances.

“Conclave,” the film, depicts a pope being chosen over a dramatic three days and seven ballots. In the last couple of centuries, conclaves have not taken longer than four days, Dr. Faggioli said. Pope Benedict XVI was elected in two days in 2005, as was Pope Francis in 2013.

“Everyone likes it when things go fast because it means a show of unity,” Dr. Kosicki said. “And it means a strong sort of message being sent to the outside world, to the 1.4 billion Catholics.”