Follow our live coverage for the funeral of Pope Francis at St. Peter’s Basilica.

For fans of the movie “Conclave,” the dean of the College of Cardinals is Cardinal Lawrence — a principled yet questioning Ralph Fiennes. The real-life dean is not a middle-aged man with sad eyes and a British accent, but a 91-year-old Italian who has spent most of his career serving in the Roman curia.

The dean, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, will preside over Pope Francis’ funeral on Saturday, but unlike Mr. Fiennes’s character, he will not run the conclave. He will not even attend, since only cardinals below the age of 80 can cast a ballot for the pope in the Sistine Chapel. Still, Cardinal Re will play an important role.

He has already summoned cardinals to Rome after the death of the pope, and he will preside over all the congregation meetings — the first of which took place on Tuesday — that the cardinals hold in the run up to the conclave.

In those meetings, cardinals decide on the logistics of the pope’s funeral rituals, but they may also give speeches and attract attention to specific issues. Some of the meetings can also set the agenda for the conclave, experts said. “The sausage of a papal election really gets ground” in the congregation meetings, said John Allen, the editor of Crux, an independent online news site covering the Catholic Church.

Cardinals in Rome on Tuesday. Only cardinals below the age of 80 can cast a ballot for the next pope in the Sistine Chapel.Credit…Claudia Greco/Reuters

Before the 2013 conclave, then-Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio gave a speech during one of the congregation meetings that emphasized the church’s duty to come out of its comfortable shell to reach people at the “peripheries.” The speech made a significant mark and helped Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio rise to become Pope Francis.

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