Agencies
Vatican City
World leaders and rank-and-file Catholic faithful bade farewell to Pope Francis in a funeral Saturday that highlighted his concern for people on the peripheries and reflected his wish to be remembered as
a simple pastor.
Though presidents and princes attended the Mass in St Peter’s Square, prisoners and migrants welcomed Francis’ coffin at his final resting place in a basilica across town.
According to Vatican estimates, some 2,50,000 people flocked to the funeral Mass at the Vatican and 1,50,000 more lined the motorcade route through downtown Rome to witness the first funeral procession for a pope in a century. They clapped and cheered “Papa Francesco” as his simple wooden coffin travelled aboard a modified popemobile to St Mary Major Basilica, some
6 kilometres away.
As bells tolled, the pallbearers brought the coffin past several dozen migrants, prisoners and homeless people holding white roses outside the basilica. Once inside, the pallbearers stopped in front of the icon of the Virgin Mary that Francis loved. Four children deposited the roses at the foot of the altar before cardinals performed the burial rite at his tomb in
a nearby niche.
Despite Francis’ focus on the powerless, the powerful were out in force at his funeral. US President Donald Trump and former President Joe Biden, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer joined Prince William and continental European royals leading more than 160 official delegations.
Argentine President Javier Milei had pride of place given Francis’ nationality, even if the two didn’t particularly get along and the pope alienated many in his homeland by never returning there.
Francis choreographed the funeral himself when he revised and simplified the Vatican’s rites and rituals last year. His aim was to emphasise the pope’s role as a mere pastor and not “a powerful man of this world.”
The white facade of St Peter’s glowed pink as the sun rose Saturday and throngs of mourners rushed into the square to get a spot for the Mass. Giant television screens were set up along the surrounding streets for those who couldn’t get close.
Many mourners had planned to be in Rome anyway this weekend for the now-postponed Holy Year canonisation of the first millennial saint, Carlo Acutis. Groups of scouts and youth church groups nearly outnumbered the gaggles of nuns and seminarians.
“He was a very charismatic pope, very human, very kind, above all very human,” said Miguel Vaca, a pilgrim from Peru who said he had camped out all night near the piazza. “It’s very emotional to say goodbye to him.”
Francis, who was also the first Jesuit pope, died Easter Monday at age 88 after suffering a stroke while recovering from pneumonia.
Even before he became pope, Francis had a particular affection for St Mary Major, home to a Byzantine-style icon of the Madonna, the Salus Populi Romani. He would pray before the icon before and after each of his foreign trips as pope.
The popemobile that brought his coffin there was made for one of those trips: Francis’ 2016 visit to Mexico, and was modified to carry a coffin.
The choice of the basilica was also symbolically significant given its ties to Francis’ Jesuit religious order. St Ignatius Loyola, who founded the Jesuits, celebrated his first Mass in the basilica on Christmas Day in 1538.
The basilica is the resting place of seven other popes, but this was the first papal burial outside the Vatican since Pope Leo XIII, who died in 1903, and was entombed in another Roman basilica in 1924.
Following the funeral, preparations can begin in earnest to launch the centuries-old process of electing a new pope, a conclave that will likely begin in the first week of May.
