When a pope dies, the figure of the Camerlengo comes into action to certify the actual demise.
An event that is not just a biological fact: for the Roman Church, a juridical and ecclesiastical cycle closes, to be sanctioned with a procedure that is not always straightforward. After the doctors, who are nonetheless present at the Pope’s bedside, attest to the clinical data of the death, it is not up to them to proceed with the definitive verification. The Camerlengo enters the Pontiff’s room: this ancient figure, appointed by the Pope himself, comes into action only after the death of the pope himself. It will be his personal verification of the state of the Holy Father that will initiate the process of announcing the passing to the world.
Three taps of a silver hammer on the Pope’s forehead.
Until the end of the twentieth century, the Camerlengo used a small silver hammer to touch the Pope’s forehead three times, pronouncing his baptismal name. If he received no response, he would solemnly proclaim: “Vere Papa mortuus est” — the Pope is truly dead. Today the rite has been modernized, with a procedure that continues, however, to have the figure of the Camerlengo at its center, from the verification of death to the sealing of the papal chambers up to the “destruction” of the Fisherman’s Ring, symbol of the temporal power of each Pontiff.
Why clinical death is not enough.
Medicine is obviously used to ascertain clinical death, but it is not enough to declare a pontificate ended. This is why the Church has maintained an autonomous protocol in which the symbolic component is as important as the technical one.
In a world where everything is documented, measured, and signed, the death of a Pope is one of the last events in which the symbol almost precedes the data. Not because science is ignored, but because the identity factor of an embodied institution is weighed as equally central.
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