If I asked you to guess how Generation Z are keeping up to date with the papacy selection process, you’d be forgiven for guessing that they just… aren’t. It’s a 700-year-old process, belonging to a 2,000-year-old church that almost exclusively involves old, religious men.
It takes place shrouded in the privacy of the Sistine Chapel (where no phones are allowed) in Vatican City. It typically involves several rounds of paper voting across multiple days and is, for all intents and purposes, deeply boring.
For the TikTok and ChatGPT generation, the process of conclave is basically the opposite of everything they enjoy. Or so you’d think.
If you leaned over to peek at a Gen Z’s TikTok or X feed right now, you’d see it littered with cardinal fancams set to Charli xcx songs, memes about the niche, daily process of conclave and live updates of the Sistine Chapel’s chimney.
(BREAKING) NOOOOOOOOO POPE! pic.twitter.com/MmS4rZ8wkJ
— Pope Crave (@ClubConcrave) May 7, 2025
Many of these posts are courtesy of PopeCrave, a fan account on X that gives regular, unserious updates on the pope selection process. It has 63,000 followers and its posts have reached up to 7.1 million people, with hundreds of thousands of likes.
PopeCrave’s name is a play on PopCrave, the social media account that posts pop culture updates, and its header image is an edited picture of the old entrance to Vogue House (adjusted to say “Conclave House”). Most recently, they have been posting live video updates from outside the Vatican, imitating actual news reporters.
Run by two Zillennial conclave obsessives, PopeCrave is the work of Susan Bin, a 30-year-old artist from Dallas (who goes by they/them pronouns) and Noelia Caballero, a 29-year-old lawyer living in Ontario, Canada. Both developed their obsession with the conclave process as a result of watching the 2024 film Conclave, starring Ralph Fiennes and Stanley Tucci. They strongly believe that the Gen Z interest in the conclave (lower case c) is connected to Conclave (upper case C).
“The novelty of Conclave the movie coming out and then conclave, the conclave happening — the timing is impeccable,” Bin says. “It really is all timing.”
The popularity of Conclave, which was nominated for eight Academy Awards and won the BAFTA for Best Film, has given many people a more informed view of the conclave process. On top of this, Bin and Caballero believe Gen Z's love of the papacy selection process is due to the current state of internet culture. “Naturally, people are fascinated with the process,” Bin says. “What’s different now is the meme-ing of it. The last time we saw a conclave, we didn’t have same kind of internet space.”
The last conclave took place in 2013, when X (then Twitter) had 218m users and TikTok didn’t exist. Now, X has a reported user base of 611m, and TikTok has been downloaded over three billion times.
Caballero says this social media landscape has made people more “primed to be memeing” than in 2013. She compares it to political elections, saying: “This is a way for people to express their political opinions in a low-stakes environment. In our approach to our account and our work, we’re mixing sincerity with factual information and humour.”
ZUPPI IS AN ICON WHO HELPED END A CIVIL WAR, IS A LEFTIST AND BLESSED A GAY COUPLE. KEEP MY CARDINAL’S NAME OUT OF YOUR MOUTH pic.twitter.com/jzqyY7xKpV https://t.co/MbtCXznkyX
— is a bela; #saveprismalaserie (@zweigsballs) May 7, 2025
While Caballero describes herself as a “cradle Catholic” who practises the faith, Bin is a Buddhist who appreciates the faith for its culture and art. Together, they created an illustrated zine dedicated to the movie Conclave, which has raised over $50,000 in proceeds since its announcement.
These proceeds will go to three charities that Bin and Caballero believe are “in line with the views of the film”: the Intersex Human Rights Fund, the Freedom Fund (“specifically for their work in the Congo,” Bin says) and Librarians and Archivists with Palestine.
The runaway success of their zine gave the PopeCrave admins a heads up that the actual conclave was going to become an online spectacle. They believe it has mass appeal, considering much of their following is made up of young non-Catholics. “Even if you’re coming at it from a non-catholic, agnostic, atheist viewpoint, it can just be a funny event to track,” Caballero says.
For her, there’s an appeal to the prayers and contemplation, but for others she sees how funny it can be to “see a bunch of old men come together in funny outfits and, like, write on a bunch of paper.”
“I mean, people throw around the word camp, but I do think there are camp elements to it in the actual academic sense of camp,” she adds.
@confidencestan Like highkey need to be there… @confidenceman_ @DJ Seinfeld #confidenceman #nowudo #pope #conclave #conclavetok #electronicmusic #popefrancis #dance
♬ Now U Do - DJ Seinfeld & Confidence Man
And while it may appear from PopeCrave’s socials that they are on the ground reporting from Vatican City, Bin and Caballero insist they’re at home in the States. “On all levels except physical, we are in the Vatican,” Caballero says. “We have on the ground correspondents [in Rome] who are people from the fandom.”
“We did pull up the flight plans and look at lodging,” Bin adds. “We were like ‘if the real conclave happens, we’re going to Rome and covering the conclave right?’” However, their trip was hindered by the fact that both of them are, in Bin’s words, “very employed.”
Bin believes that the new Catholic fandom is providing an alternative kind of internet space for young catholics, who otherwise would have a limited selection of influencers. “My familiarity with Catholic internet culture and the dominant influencers pre-’Clave is that it’s very right wing, radicalised trad-Caths. But now there’s this element of subversiveness. It’s extremely funny to be making Brat fancams of the Catholic church, knowing what the Catholic church currently and historically is.”
As for the actual papacy contenders, the internet has its favourites, and so does PopeCrave. One particular cardinal, Matteo Zuppi, has become the subject of fancams, dedicated fanart and online campaigning, with one X user commenting on the phenomenon: “They’re stanning church cardinals like kpop group members now, who the f*** is Zuppi.”
The stan (an accelerated version of fan) culture around the cardinals has become so close to fandom that some netizens are even shipping some cardinals (willing for them to be in relationships). “Unfortunately for other people, I’m not shipping the cardinals. Those are my fathers,” Caballero laughs.
Other people are clamouring for Conclave parallels. “The amount of times people are like ‘Which ones the Stanley Tucci cardinal?’” Bin says. “We don’t want a Tedesco, but we’d be okay with a Bellini,” Caballero says, adding: “Both of us are in agreement that we want someone progressive, someone open-minded. Someone who will pay attention to global events that others ignore, like Gaza. Someone who will welcome in LGBTQ Catholics.”
Most importantly she wants someone who will be a “bastion of hope against encroaching facism, basically.” They’re also prepared for a shock result when the smoke turns white. “We really don’t know, Pope Francis wasn’t one of the frontrunners going into the conclave, but he became Pope,” says Caballero.
— Pope Crave (@ClubConcrave) May 8, 2025
More traditional Catholics may bristle at the idea of their religion becoming a fandom in this way, but the PopeCrave admins don’t really care. “Catholicism is a fandom, move on,” Bin declares. “I’ve had people say: ‘I think Pope Francis would like this because you’re just trying to make the church more accessible,' and I think so too, I think he would love our memes.”
As for the future of PopeCrave once the conclave is over, and we officially have a new pope? “The Holy See should give me the password to their Twitter account,” Bin laughs.
