In a solemn and majestic funeral on the steps of St. Peter’s Basilica, the Roman Catholic Church on Saturday laid to rest Pope Francis, the first South American pope, whose simple style, pastoral vision and outsized footprint on the world stage both reinvigorated and divided the institution that he led for a dozen years.
Heads of state, royals and religious leaders sat with an array of Catholic prelates in brilliant red robes around a closed cypress coffin holding the body of Francis, who died Monday at 88. Atop his coffin, the pages of an open book of the gospels fanned in the breeze.
Hundreds of thousands of faithful filled and spilled out of St. Peter’s Square and streamed down the long avenue to the Tiber River. In the previous days, about 250,000 waited on long lines to say farewell to the pope, whose body was dressed in red vestments and scuffed black shoes, as he lay in state before the basilica’s altar.
“The guiding thread of his mission was also the conviction that the church is a home for all, a home with its doors always open,” said Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, dean of the College of Cardinals, in his homily during the Requiem Mass on Saturday.
As the cardinals arrayed around him prepared to head into a conclave next month to choose Francis’ successor, Cardinal Re avoided obvious political overtones but highlighted Francis’ pastoral and inclusive approach and his humble style as key to the esteem in which Francis was held inside and outside the church.
Francis had spread the faith with a sense of joy, a “great spontaneity and an informal way of addressing everyone,” he said, and a spirit of “welcome and listening.” But Francis also “truly shared the anxieties, sufferings and hopes of this time of globalization.”
Francis, perhaps the world’s loudest voice for the voiceless, leaves the world at a moment of flux, when the migrants he championed are undergoing mass deportations, the authoritarianism he warned against is on the rise and the post-World War II alliances he hoped would provide peace are turning upside down. In a way, Saturday’s funeral amounted to a final act for a pope who sought until the end to bring people together.
President Trump, whose Christianity Francis once questioned, was there, as was President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, and they met inside St. Peter’s Basilica before the funeral, in what the White House called a “very productive discussion.”
Also attending the funeral were European heads of state and leaders of the European Union, which Mr. Trump has said was “formed in order to screw the United States.” There were also leaders of many of the countries Francis visited — some of whom he implored to make peace or to do a better job defending human rights. Former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., whom Francis once told he could accept communion despite his support for abortion rights, sat with other dignitaries.
As a bell tolled a death knell, silence fell over the piazza, quiet except for the sound of sea gulls. Inside the basilica, 14 pallbearers carried the pope’s coffin through a corridor of cardinals, dressed in red vestments, out onto the steps of the church. From above, the cardinals’ section on one side of the coffin made for a brilliant red rectangle opposite the rectangle of dignitaries in dark suits.
The whole square looked like a patchwork: purple, white, black, depending on the type of clergy and the colors blending together in the long crowd of faithful that reached from the square to the Tiber River.
Beside the coffin, sprinkled with holy water by Cardinal Re, the cardinals who will choose the next pontiff were somber with prayer and the burden of the coming conclave to pick the 267th leader of the church. With that choice, they will also decide whether the church follows or veers away from Francis’ vision of a church that puts more emphasis on mercy and inclusion than on rules and doctrine.
Some of them want to go further toward allowing women to be deacons or married men priests; others want to pull back. Some want to reach into Asia or Africa for a new pope to spread the faith; others want to bring the papacy back home to Italy to get the house in order after an eventful and, at times, destabilizing pontificate.
But on Saturday, all the attention was on Francis, the Argentine of Italian heritage, born as Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who was raised in a humble Buenos Aires neighborhood, became a Jesuit priest and rose to the pinnacle of the Church. Once there, he tried to break the church out of its walls after decades of conservative rule, and to bring it closer to the 1.3 billion faithful where they were, both geographically and in how they lived their lives.
“He was a pope among the people, with an open heart toward everyone,” Cardinal Re said, standing behind Francis’ coffin on the steps of St. Peter’s Square. “He was also a pope attentive to the signs of the times and what the Holy Spirit was awakening in the church.”
With Mr. Trump seated a few yards away, Cardinal Re recalled the late pope’s trip to the border between Mexico and the United States, one of his many “gestures and exhortations in favor of refugees and displaced persons,” when Francis spoke of the need to “build bridges and not walls.”
In the past, only cardinals and patriarchs could celebrate a papal funeral, but Francis allowed all clergy to take part in that role, in keeping with his effort to create a humbler, less top-down image of the church. Francis put social justice, and accompanying people more than lecturing them, at the heart of his mission.
Over time, as liberal leaders faded from the world stage, he became an increasingly lonely voice speaking up for migrants and the marginalized.
“He was the only global moral leader we had,” said Rev. Antonio Spadaro, a fellow Jesuit and close aide of Francis. He recalled once saying as much to Francis, who playfully smacked his hand and told him he was speaking nonsense. But years later, when he repeated his observation to Francis, the pope entertained the possibility, remaining silent.
Francis, who took the name of the medieval saint who dedicated his life to the poor, was a pope of gestures and symbols that amplified his vision of a more humble church. He paid his own hotel bill after his election as pope; he rode around in simple cars; he washed the feet of criminals and ate with the destitute in soup kitchens.
Even in death, those symbols persisted. Charity groups brought poor people to the front rows to emphasize Francis’ attention to the marginalized.
“He was a pope from the pueblo and lived for the poor,” said Christian Rivas, 43, from Ecuador, who sat in the crowd during the funeral. “When he was first elected, my heart beat fast.”
Francis asked to be buried in a basilica across town, next to an icon of the Virgin Mary that he venerated, in a simple, undecorated tomb marked with the inscription, “Franciscus,” his name in Latin. The coffin contains commemorative medals and coins minted during his papacy; a short text describing his pontificate in a metal tube; and the episcopal palliums, the white wool vestments worn around the neck that symbolize a bishop’s ecclesiastical jurisdiction.
But for all the emphasis Francis placed on modesty, his funeral, that of a reigning pope, was much larger than that of his predecessor, Benedict XVI, who had stunned the church and world when he became the first pope in about 500 years to resign the papacy. Francis himself presided over the funeral of Pope Emeritus Benedict, an unprecedented moment of one pope presiding over the final farewell of another.
Rome was essentially paralyzed by all the world leaders in town. On Friday night, the authorities shut down a bridge so that President Emmanuel Macron of France and his wife could stroll across it. Sirens sounded incessantly. On Saturday, helicopter rotors chopped the warm spring air. But all went silent for the funeral mass.
At its conclusion, the pope’s casket was returned to the basilica and then loaded into the popemobile, which had carried Pope Francis thousands of times around St. Peter’s Square and to meet the faithful around the world. It now bore his body for burial in the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore.
During the funeral homily, Cardinal Re noted that the enduring image of Francis would be from Easter Sunday, the day before his death when, despite the fact that he was obviously ailing, he came to a balcony overlooking St. Peter’s Square to deliver his blessing and then went down to greet the crowd, in a final trip in his popemobile.
Recalling that Francis often ended talks with an invitation to pray for him, the cardinal concluded, “Dear Pope Francis, we now ask you to pray for us.”
