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MORE than Diego Maradona and more than Lionel Messi, Pope Francis was the most famous Argentinian who ever lived – and, even in the company of World Cup winners, by far the most beloved.
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EPASo under a blue Roman sky on a beautiful spring day, they came from every corner of the planet, from every station in life, for the funeral of Pope Francis.
In dazzling sunshine, his funeral mass in St Peter’s Square was watched by 50 black-clad world leaders, ten reigning monarchs and one future king — our own Prince William — and, facing them across the square, serried rows of red-and-white-robed cardinals, archbishops and bishops.
And the mass was watched by the people — 40,000 of them in St Peter’s Square, and 200,000 more beyond Vatican City, in the streets of Rome, all hushed in their mourning.
The world leaders paid their respects. But it was the people who silently wept.
As the funeral mass unfolded, you understood there is a deference that comes with being head of the Roman Catholic Church and Holy Father — God’s representative on Earth — to 1.4billion Catholics.
But then there is the love that is earned over the course of a lifetime. And that love is not given to the office of the Papacy. It is given to the man.
Pope Francis, born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Buenos Aires days before Christmas in 1936, was loved by people of every faith, and by those with none.
In a world that is frantically building barriers and walls — between people, between nations — Francis built bridges. And that is why he was loved.
The mass for Pope Francis was a ceremony designed to inspire awe in mortals who were in the presence of the sacred.
The heavenly voices of the requiem, the splendour of St Peter’s Basilica looming above Francis’ simple wooden coffin, the blessings in Latin — here were holy conventions that have endured for millennia.
Modest coffin
The homily. Communion. The prayer that the saints and martyrs of Christianity will pray for the soul of Pope Francis.
Here were the rituals of a Papacy that traces its roots all the way to Jesus Christ’s disciple, Peter, who gave his name to this magnificent square where Francis’ modest coffin sat yesterday, watched by the world.
It was Peter who was the most human of the disciples, who in a moment of weakness betrayed Christ three times before the rooster crowed. Peter the apostle, who came to Rome to spread the gospel, was martyred in this same square, crucified upside down by Emperor Nero.
As the hypnotic prayers and haunting music of the funeral mass drifted to the heavens, the stories of the Gospels felt very close to this bright spring in Rome.
In our secular modern world, the beliefs that have shaped western civilisation for 2,000 years were present in St Peter’s Square.
That Jesus lived and died, that He was the son of God, and the man being buried was God’s representative on Earth. That we all have a soul.
And it was profoundly moving because you did not need to be Catholic to revere this man, or to be touched by a ceremony conducted in song, prayer and silent ritual.
Pope Francis led a life fuelled by faith, a faith with no doubts that this world, this life, is but a prelude for the eternal life that is yet to come
Like Queen Elizabeth II, Pope Francis led a life fuelled by faith, a faith with no doubts that this world, this life, is but a prelude for the eternal life that is yet to come. It is not a remotely fashionable belief.
But echoes of our late Queen’s funeral were everywhere on Saturday.
Francis was Pope for just 12 years but his funeral bore the weight of 20 centuries of tradition.
The rituals of the ages, meticulously choreographed. But it was when the coffin began its procession out of St Peter’s Square that you saw the similarities to the Queen’s funeral most clearly among the faces of those crowds.
They looked like they had suffered a family bereavement.
This was a sacred day, and a day for watching history unfold, but the man we remembered could hardly have been more human.
When he became Pope at the age of 76 in 2013, Francis took his name from St Francis of Assisi, known for his humility, for turning his back on privilege to serve the poor and fighting for social justice.
AFP
AP
Reuters
AFPThis 21st-century Francis was a simple man who lived his life not in a splendid papal apartment but in a plain, two-room Vatican guesthouse.
But for all the humility of the man, yesterday belonged to the formal procedures of the Papacy.
Yet your eyes constantly drifted back to that simple wooden coffin, and memories of the man.
Before his death at the age of 88, Pope Francis fought ill-health for a lifetime, having part of his lung removed at the age of 21. And he fought injustice for a lifetime too.
They called him the Pope of the Poor, the People’s Pope, the most approachable Pope in 2,000 years — soundbites that struggle to capture a lifetime of warmth, compassion and devotion.
Religious splendour
In Argentina, they called him “the Slum Bishop” for his work in the barrios.
As a young priest, when his country was ruled by a military dictatorship, he had risked his life smuggling people out of the country to flee the death squads. Yes, this was a day of timeless ritual and religious splendour.
But when you saw the bereaved expressions of the crowds, you never for one moment forgot that we mourned a man who spent a lifetime fighting for the poor, the outcast, the underdog.
This Pope was called a moderniser. It is closer to the truth to say Francis was a humanitarian.
To traditionalists, his instinctive tolerance, understanding and empathy were dangerously radical.
To progressives, his reforms never went far enough. Francis was no woke Pope.
He wanted to broaden the role of women in the Catholic church but blocked the ordination of women priests. But in a world that grows less tolerant, Francis fought for those with nothing.
He agonised over Ukraine and Gaza. When Hamas attacked Israel on October 7 2023, every night for more than a year he made a video call to Palestinian Christians sheltering inside a church in Gaza.
Asked about gay people, Pope Francis famously said: “If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge?”
You do not need to be Catholic to see that Francis was a special man.
You do not even have to believe in God.
On his first overseas visit since becoming President, Donald Trump sat in the front row of VIPs at the funeral, looking like he would rather be on a Florida golf course.
Francis was a pontiff who earned respect across all the barriers of race and creed
Trump was there to pay his respects to a Pope who was the only world leader with the moral strength to stand up to him, a Pope who was disgusted by what he saw as the inhumanity of Trump’s mass deportations.
Francis was a pontiff who earned respect across all the barriers of race and creed.
“The church must walk among the people and be in step with the poor,” he said in one of his most famous speeches.
Francis died over Easter, that most sacred of Christian festivals.
He spent a lifetime practising exactly the faith he preached.
Decent man
After the mass in St Peter’s Square, the bells tolled as they carried the coffin out of the Vatican City and into Rome itself.
Popes are usually buried in three coffins but they carried Pope Francis to his rest in a simple, single zinc-lined wooden coffin.
At noon, the first non-European Pope for 1,000 years became the first Pope to be buried outside the Vatican for more than a century.
To constant ripples of spontaneous applause, and with the occasional call of “Grazie!” — thank you — they transported his coffin over the River Tiber and past the Colosseum to his final resting place in his beloved Santa Maria Maggiore, the beautiful church where he came to pray.
His marble tombstone is, at his own wishes, “simple, without particular ornamentation”, and bears only the inscription of his taken Papal name in Latin — Franciscus. Yesterday in Rome, amid all the gilded majesty and ancient ritual, the world came together to mourn a simple, decent man who embodied compassion, kindness and human warmth.
The very heart of the Christian message.
Faith, the kind of faith our late Queen felt and this Pope gave his life to, is not thriving in our modern world.
But as they laid Pope Francis to his rest, there was no doubt in the mind of those heartbroken crowds who came to mourn in Rome.
Now he is with God.
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