Rome—A stranger wandering the city might be forgiven for thinking that Pope Francis is still alive. His face is everywhere: printed on the T-shirts, prayer cards, and rosaries sold in those junky kiosks; smiling in the trattorias and gelaterias; sketched hastily on the tenement walls outside the tourist districts. You can even find a 2026 Pope Francis calendar in a used bookstore, printed months after he had departed the Chair of Saint Peter. Of course, in most of these places there are other popes, too. The sainted John Paul II beams down from many a souvenir store window, and the chair’s current occupant Pope Leo XIV grimaces from almost every consumer product imaginable. Benedict XVI is curiously absent; aside from a few official inscriptions, not a trace of his reign remains in the Eternal City. Francis completely dominates the scene. Though he has been dead a year, he is still very much with us.

This comes as no surprise. Francis’s life was a series of contradictions. There is no reason why his death should be any different. He was at once plainspoken and ambiguous; tenderhearted and humorless; liberal-minded and intolerant; a smile and a scowl. During his twelve-year pontificate he never broke character. And though everyone else was desperate to resolve the paradox, to make some sense out of him, Francis himself appeared unconcerned. It was as if he were playing a solitary game of ping-pong, where he commanded both sides of the tabletop. But last spring the ball fell out of the air, and the paddles were laid flat. His successor, it seems, has little interest in picking up the game.

Francis left the Church one final unresolved contradiction: his tomb. He is the first pope in more than a century to be buried outside of Saint Peter’s Basilica. Instead, he was laid to rest at the Basilica of Saint Mary Major, down by Rome’s central train station. Some interpreted his decision as an expression of modesty. The pope who cast off the pomp of his office, who refused residence in the Apostolic Palace, who on his hands and knees washed the feet of thieves and murderers—naturally, so humble a soul would shudder at the thought of his body adorning the greatest monument to the Church’s earthly glory. Better that he be buried out among the people, to whom he felt closest. But others saw the decision as the ultimate statement of vanity. Mary Major, after all, is one of the most popular churches in the city. It houses the jewel-encrusted relics of Christ’s manger and the famous icon of the Blessed Virgin Mary, so old that it is believed to have been painted by Saint Luke. And every Holy Thursday, thousands of people pray at its altars as they complete the traditional seven churches pilgrimage. How convenient it would be if they had another, newer object of devotion. Were he buried in Saint Peter’s, Francis would be just one pope among many, but down at Mary Major, his shrine can remain the center of attention in perpetuity.

And yet neither of these interpretations is the truth. The truth is much stranger.

Before Francis, Mary Major already housed the remains of seven other popes. These tombs are monuments to the papacy’s temporal authority. Perhaps the most grand of all is that of Clement VIII, which occupies the same chapel as the famous icon. It is a floor-to-ceiling affair: Corinthian columns, marble cornice upon marble cornice, chaste caryatids carved by Bernini’s father—every signifier of magnificence is there, arranged against the wall in a pleasing performance of Baroque maximalism. Between the architectural elements are depicted, in high relief, notable scenes from Clement’s reign. Here he receives the papal tiara; here he brokers peace between France and Spain; here he spurs the Christian troops to repel the Turks from Hungary. In the center of it all is an oversized statue of Clement himself, seated on a throne, hand outstretched in blessing to all who kneel before his bones. This is a man of history. This is the one who codified the Vulgate, who burned heretics, who subdued princes before God.

Equally resplendent are the tombs of Paul V, Sixtus V, and Saint Pius V. Their deeds are familiar even to those who don’t know their names. Paul’s inscription—PAVLVS V BVRGHESIVS ROMANVS—is etched into the façade of Saint Peter’s, for he is the one who brought work on the basilica to completion. And Sixtus’s munificence is likewise proclaimed in stone all throughout the city. He built the Lateran Palace and the Vatican libraries; he raised the obelisks; he enthroned Saints Peter and Paul atop the columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius. And the works of these popes extend to Mary Major, too. Paul constructed the chapel around the icon, Sixtus the reliquary for the manger. Pius, of course, is one of the great heroes of Church history: to his prayers and supplications we owe the victory at Lepanto. And the Mass of Trent, his Mass, is still sung in churches around the world. Great works and great men—these three popes are memorialized by heavy and ornamented statues that express the full gravity of their office.

The casual observer at Mary Major will probably only glance at these impressive tombs. The sepulchral idiom of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries was rather grandiose, and the riches of the Church were lavished on the dead without discrimination. It is easy to regard the art produced in this era indifferently, as background noise. Even some contemporary observers felt that it was overblown. Clement IX, who is buried near the entrance of Mary Major, requested that on his death, his ashes be deposited under the church’s floor, with only the simplest inscription marking his grave. This degradation was unthinkable to his successor. Rome, after all, is the center of the universe, the great arena where earthly and divine powers commingle. It is to be represented as such. And so, much against his wishes, a hulking statue of Clement IX now lords over the church floor from a marble dais under a marble canopy, delivering its benediction on impassive observers.

How strange, then, for Pope Francis to be buried here. Of course, it would be the same no matter where in Rome he was laid. There is little room for simplicity in the Eternal City. From the Ara Pacis, where Augustus established the empire in stone, to the Ara Coeli, where Gibbon contemplated its decline and fall, the full oppressive weight of history bears down upon the city’s pilgrims. All who enter are overwhelmed. It is exhilarating and exhausting. And yet—for but a moment—to visit the tomb of Pope Francis is to leave Rome behind. You discard history. You have entered the sphere of mythology.

Once you enter the church, you cannot help but be drawn to the tomb. It exercises a strange power over all who pass by. Unlike the other monuments in Mary Major, it is free from embellishment. In fact, it is little more than a blank sheet of ivory marble inset in the walls between two confessionals. Francis expressed a particular devotion to the famous icon of Our Lady and, in death, wanted to be as close to it as possible. Since Clement and Paul have already crowded up the chapel, he had to settle for a spot just outside, formerly a broom closet. The tomb’s construction was more a matter of subtraction than anything else. Away went the seafoam marble, the seventeenth-century woodwork, any evidence of Baroque fussiness. In its place went . . . nothing. It is impossible not to gape. The white hole is irresistible. Pilgrims may mill about the tombs of other eminences, but they are sucked into that of Francis.

You too are attracted to the scene. As you approach, you are enveloped in the murmur of the crowd. People are commenting, cursing, elbowing past each other to get to the front. Everyone seems to have his phone out. A sign posted near the tomb begs for reverence—Respect the atmosphere of silence and prayer. Do not stand on the kneelers. Taking selfies is prohibited—but its pleas are ignored. You join the fray and push to the front. There, in a semicircle around the tomb, it is quieter. All manner of people are kneeling before the plain white stone, on which is simply written: FRANCISCUS. Their heads are bowed, hands clasped; they are praying—for whom? or is it to whom?—and you, swept up in their fervor, do the same.

You kneel and close your eyes. But once you open them, your mind wanders. The very whiteness of the walls, of the floor, of the headstone seems to invite reflection. So much empty space demands to be filled. But with what? It is impossible to say. That’s the trick of a tabula rasa: there is no right answer. Francis is whatever you make of him. Hero, villain; angel, demon—all can be projected convincingly onto a white wall. Maybe, you wonder, the real Francis is the blankness itself.

But then you look up. There is actually one object on the wall: a small crucifix, a replica of the cross that Francis wore on his chest. And then you remember. One time, so long ago it seems, Francis strode through the deserted streets of a diseased city, bathed in unreal blue light. Everyone else in authority had fled. All that remained was this old man. He walked slowly in the rain through Saint Peter’s Square and stopped before the ancient icon, which he had moved from Mary Major for this very occasion. He bowed his head. Who could say if the water running down his cheeks was tears or rain? Into the basilica he went. From the altar he raised a golden monstrance. He turned and walked back into the square. There he held it aloft, bared the Blessed Sacrament to the world, and made the sign of the cross over the whole vacant expanse. And then—gone.

After that Francis slipped slowly, then suddenly, into senescence. What was left to him? He had performed his duty; he had stood firm right at the point where the gates of Hell might have prevailed. It was his last, perhaps only, great act. The final five years of his papacy unfolded like a bad dream. The self-defeating restrictions on the Latin Mass, the humiliating trip to Canada, the ongoing meta-textual mess of the Synod of Synodality—Francis stumbled through the remainder of his papacy beaten and broken. To attend a general audience in those years was a bizarre experience: Francis zoomed through Saint Peter’s Square seated in the back of the Popemobile with his arms crossed. Though the crowds cheered, he hardly spoke and he never smiled. For him the world had ended long ago; he was just waiting to leave it.

And then he did, just over a year ago. Time stopped. The churches were draped in black, and the chair of Peter sat empty.

Just as quickly, another era commenced. A new pope was chosen, this time from North America. It is still too soon to say what sort of leader he will prove to be. But it is plain that the Church has re-entered the realm of history. Leo may not possess the raw power afforded by the dominions of a Clement or Sixtus. He may not wear the tiara or oversee the construction of great architectural works. But he governs in the older tradition. Just as those popes advanced policies and promulgated doctrines in keeping with the demands of their own times, so too has Leo in his short reign sought to give the Church’s answer to the technological and geopolitical challenges of our own day. His aims are practical and his expression is modest. He is not a showman. The world of Francis has been left behind.

But to pray at the tomb of Pope Francis is to revisit his strange rule. Those slabs of marble are powerful, even moving. It is telling that he requested that everything but the cross be stripped away. Even in five hundred years, when the minutiae of Francis’s papacy have long been forgotten, pilgrims stopping into Mary Major will know exactly what is meant by this memorial.

Here, he will always be the pope at the end of the world, forever poised on that terrible precipice where the finite gives way to the infinite. This is the myth of Francis, and it lives in his tomb.