Broadcast ritual dynamics among US Catholics during the 2025 papal conclave

The 2025 papal conclave offered a natural experiment to trace how shared emotion and group identity evolve on the timescale of hours to days after a global broadcast ritual. Smartphone prompts delivered four surveys per day to 117 US Catholics from 2 days before the first ballot until 12 days after the inaugural blessing, yielding over 5,900 observations. Continuous-time models estimated that collective enthusiasm showed a small, instantaneous surge (0.25 SD) at the "Habemus Papam" announcement and then decayed by half within 16 hours. Religious identity changed more slowly, with a half-life of 42 h, and exhibited a comparable jump (0.20 SD) at the announcement, both jumps measured relative to the prevailing balloting-phase level. Dynamic cross-effects showed that elevated enthusiasm predicted modest gains in identity (cross-drift = 0.18 SD day^-1), whereas higher identity predicted reduced enthusiasm (cross-drift = -0.39 SD day^-1), suggesting regulatory feedback. Ritual phases also shifted trajectories: during secret balloting, constant inputs for enthusiasm (+0.13 SD) and identity (+0.12 SD) were modestly elevated relative to preballoting, whereas postannouncement phases slightly undershot preritual baselines. Finally, participants with above-average combined engagement showed little to no decline in self-rated religiosity, whereas those below average declined by 0.41 SD. These findings demonstrate a two-step process-an immediate wave of collective affective alignment followed by a slower, lasting identity build-and show that mediated rituals can align dispersed audiences and prolong the salience of group identity.