The death of Pope Paul VI enters Andy Warhol’s diary not as a formal account of the papacy but as a moment of shared television viewing and public spectacle. In the entry dated August 12, 1978, Brigid Berlin calls and asks Warhol to watch the funeral with her; the scene stays with the crowd’s applause, the ceremony’s production, and his quick calculation of how many popes there have been and how long they tend to serve.

The Funeral on Television

The entry opens with the news that the Pope has died and Brigid Berlin’s request that Warhol watch the funeral on television with her. The record does not describe whether they watched together in person or what they said to one another during the broadcast; its focus is Warhol’s account of what appeared on screen. The funeral becomes a shared point of attention, conveyed through a brief domestic exchange rather than an explanation of the religious or political circumstances of the death.

Warhol describes the Pope’s body being brought out in Rome and notes that the people standing around applauded. He interprets their response as an appreciation of the ceremony’s production. In this telling, the funeral’s public staging is the detail that catches his eye: the crowd’s reaction and the spectacle of the procession, rather than grief or doctrinal meaning, organize the diary entry.

Warhol’s View of the Papal Succession

After the applause, Warhol turns from the particular funeral to the institution’s long history. He remarks that there have already been 262 popes, then reflects that popes are generally old when they take office and, in his estimate, usually last about fifteen years. The sudden movement from a body being carried out to a numerical count gives the entry its characteristic scale shift: a public death is registered as one point in a succession.

The comment is conversational and approximate, not a historical account. Warhol’s attention moves from what the television shows to the pattern he sees behind it—many officeholders, most of them elderly, each serving for a comparatively limited span. The observation makes mortality legible through numbers and duration, while leaving the meaning of the particular death largely unstated.

The Diary’s Intimate Record

The funeral appears within a diary built from Warhol’s daily reports to Pat Hackett. Their weekday calls, ostensibly intended to record activities and cash expenses, could stretch from the intended five minutes to one or two hours; Hackett took notes as they talked and typed the entry soon after the call. The diary’s conversational method helps explain why a world-historical death can sit beside an everyday request from a friend and a passing judgment about a television event.

Hackett describes the calls as conversations in which Warhol supplied details large and small, and notes that he sometimes added or corrected material later, asking her to put it in the diary. For publication, she removed most references that belonged only to their private exchange and recast the occasional retained reference to herself in the third person. The result preserves an intimate, spoken quality while making the reader the implied listener. In the Pope’s funeral entry, that form leaves the event immediate but deliberately narrow: a call from Brigid Berlin, a crowd applauding in Rome, and Warhol’s brief reckoning with the institution’s past.