Vatican City. More than 250,000 faithful attended Pope Francis' funeral, held this Saturday, April 26, in St. Peter's Square to bid him farewell. The Supreme Pontiff will be laid to rest in a private ceremony, following an emotional funeral that ended a 12-year papacy defined by humility and simplicity.
Around 8:30 a.m. local time, thousands of people began to fill the square ahead of the funeral. Although presidents and princes attended the Mass in St. Peter's Square, including U.S. President Donald Trump, inmates and migrants welcomed him to the basilica across town where he would be buried.
Tens of thousands more lined the funeral procession route, applauding and shouting "Pope Francesco" as his simple wooden coffin was driven through the streets of Rome aboard one of its vintage popemobiles toward his final resting place in the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, across the Italian capital. It was then carried inside the church escorted by the Swiss Guard.
Italian Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi reported that 400,000 people attended Pope Francis' funeral: 250,000 in and around St. Peter's and 150,000 on the route to St. Mary Major.
Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, 91, dean of the College of Cardinals, delivered a long, lively, and very personal homily. He described the Argentine Jesuit as the pope of the people, a pastor who knew how to communicate with "the least of these" in an informal and spontaneous style.
“He was a pope of the people, with a heart open to all,” Re said. He was applauded by the crowd when he recalled the pontiff’s constant concern for migrants, including the Mass he celebrated at the U.S.-Mexico border and his trip to a refugee camp in Lesbos, Greece, from which he took 12 migrants with him. “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,” Re added.
According to Re, through his travels, including his most recent major tour of Asia last year, he reached "the most peripheral of the world's peripheries." The Argentine Jesuit rehearsed the funeral himself when he revised and simplified the Vatican's rites and rituals last year. His goal was to emphasize the pope's role as a simple priest and not as a powerful man of this world.
It was a reflection of his 12-year project to radically reform the papacy, emphasize the role of priests as servants, and build a poor Church for the poor.
