The death of a Pope, in and of itself, is not a very exceptional thing. People die. All people die. Popes die too. It has happened many, many times before. It will probably happen again. And, the current incumbent has been there a quarter of a century, is 84 years old, and has multiple serious ailments, some of which has stalked him for many years.
No, the human miracle happens after his given name has been pronounced three times and the word has gone to another Cardinal in the PR department and the bells in the Vatican have been rung.
You see, the Catholic church is a monarchy with no specific named successor. Hierarchical organizations abhor leadership vacuums. Armies have elaborate rules about who will be in charge when various officers are killed. The United States has an elaborate chain of succession. Caibnent departments without leadership immediatel secure an "Acting Secretary", as do universities and corporations. The need to have a leader is omnipresent. Even a moment without leadership strikes mortal fear into organizations.
But, the Catholic Church will take a couple of weeks and do nothing but mourn and gather in the flock. The debate of the Cardinals over a successor has been known to take a couple of months, although a deliberation that long is probably unlikely this time around.
And, nobody panics. Your neighborhood Catholic church is still going to hold mass. Weddings will be performed on schedule and funerals will be conducted as necessary. Bishops will go on doing whatever it is that Bishops do, unless, of course, they are Cardinals, in which case they will be on an all expense paid trip to Rome. The streets of the Vatican will still be swept, meals will be cooked, and the electric bill will still be paid, without anyone getting to worried.
Thousands, probably tens or hundreds of thousands of Catholic officials and employees will go right on behaving as they always have without any leader at the top whatsoever.
It isn't clear that there is any power on Earth with the authority to definitively resolve a dispute in the vote of the Cardinals if one came up, but there has been no dispute for several hundred years, and there won't be one this time.
Freed of a dictator, the church will promptly choose a successor dictator, without any compulsion, and will give the person selected their full loyalty and respect, regardless of the concordance of their own views on church issues with those of the new Pope.
While there have been stumbles in the line of succession (producing the wonderful term "anti-Popes"), this organization has managed to secure an orderly succession of leaders capable of carrying out his term without seeing the church crumble since before the British had ended the absolute power of its monarch.
Setting aside the occassional, now centuries old, succession fights, the Catholic Church is one of the oldest continuously existing organizations on Earth. It is older than every single regime now in existence, even the Icelandic Parliament. To keep an organization of any kind healthy for so long is a human miracle, and to keep it in existence, despite periodic long periods of laederlessness, is even more remarkable.
Religion has been the source of many wrongs in human history, but it has also helped facilitate great human triumphs, such as the continued existence of such an influencial church for so long.