His funeral and burial marked the beginning of nine days of official mourning at the Vatican.

Cardinals will lead masses each day, and the words of their homilies, their reflections on the

scripture readings that day, will undoubtedly be closely examined and analyzed for clues about

what's on their minds as they prepare to elect a new pope. John Allen has covered the Vatican for 30 years.

He's editor of Crux, an online site that covers the Vatican and the Catholic Church.

John, practically all the Cardinals who are eligible to vote, that means the Cardinals who are

under the age of 80, or at today's funeral, they'll be in Rome leading up to the conclave.

In those days,

are they going to be talking to each other either formally or informally about who they might see as the next pope? Oh, absolutely. They'll be talking to one another about who they see as the next

pope. That is, after all, the business they have been called to Rome to perform.

And so in these daily meetings of Cardinals for their meeting every morning called the general congregation meetings, some of that is procedural, but some of it allows Cardinals the

opportunity to talk to one another about what they see is the issues facing the church

to sort through where the church stands and where these

Cardinals believe it needs to go. Specifically at this time right now, what are some of the

considerations the Cardinals will be thinking about? I think fundamentally, the issue facing every

conclave is, do you want to keep going in terms of the papacy that just ended? Or do you want to try something

else? But beyond that, there is a complicated sort of bushel basket full of issues they'll be

looking at from geopolitics. We're entering an era where old alliances seem to be falling apart

and new ones are coming into view.

And they'll want somebody who can steer the church safely through those storms to internal

church debates over contentious matters such as women and outreach to the LGBT-plus community

to more broad social concerns, such as migration and climate change and poverty relief,

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