Though presidents and princes attended the mass in St Peter’s Square today, prisoners and migrants welcomed him at the basilica across town where he will be buried.
Some 250,000 people flocked to the funeral, held on a brilliant spring day that was supposed to have been a special Holy Year celebration for adolescents.
Perhaps because so many young people were on hand, the somber ceremony still had a festive mood, with mourners taking selfies amid the hymns as Francis’ simple wooden coffin was brought out of St Peter’s Basilica at the start of the Mass.
Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, the 91-year-old dean of the College of Cardinals, delivered a lengthy, spirited and highly personal homily, or sermon. He eulogised Francis as a pope of the people, a pastor who knew how to communicate to the “least among us” with an informal, spontaneous style.
“He was a pope among the people, with an open heart towards everyone,” Re said.
He drew applause from the crowd when he recounted Francis’ constant concern for migrants, including when he celebrated Mass at the US-Mexico border and travelled to a refugee camp in Lesbos, Greece, and brought 12 migrants home 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 said.
The Argentine pontiff 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 funeral of Pope Francis: World leaders, royals, pay their respects
It was a reflection of Francis’ 12-year project to radically reform the papacy, to stress priests as servants and to construct “a poor church for the poor”.
He articulated the mission just days after his 2013 election and it explained the name he chose as pope, honouring St Francis of Assisi “who had the heart of the poor of the world”, according to the official decree of the pope’s life that was placed in his coffin before it was sealed on Friday night.
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 António Guterres, and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer joined Prince William and European royals leading more than 160 official delegations.
Argentine President Javier Milei had the pride of place given Francis’ nationality, even if the two didn’t particularly get along and the pope alienated many Argentines by never returning home.
Trump and Zelenskyy met privately on the sidelines of the funeral. A photo showed the two men sitting alone, facing one another and hunched over on chairs in St Peter’s Basilica.
After the Mass, Francis’ coffin left the Vatican en route to his burial place in St Mary Major Basilica.
The white facade of St Peter’s glowed pink as the sun rose and hordes of mourners rushed into the square. Giant television screens were set up along the surrounding streets for those who couldn’t get close.
The Mass and funeral procession across town — with Francis’ coffin carried on the open-topped popemobile he used during his 2015 trip to the Philippines — were also broadcast live around the world.
Police helicopters whirled overhead, part of the massive security operation Italian authorities mounted, including more than 2500 police, 1500 soldiers and a torpedo ship off the coast, Italian media reported.
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, and 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 near the piazza.
“It is a very great emotion to say goodbye to him.”
The poor and marginalised welcome him
Following his 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.
In the interim, the Vatican is being run by a handful of cardinals, key among them Re, who is organising the secret voting in the Sistine Chapel.
Francis is breaking with recent tradition and will be buried in St Mary Major, near Rome’s main train station, where a simple tomb awaits him with just his name: Franciscus.
As many as 300,000 people are expected to line the Six-kilometre motorcade route that will bring Francis’ coffin from the Vatican through the centre of Rome to the basilica after the funeral.
Forty special guests, organised by the Vatican’s Caritas charity and the Sant’Egidio community, will greet his coffin at the basilica, honouring the marginalised groups Francis prioritised as pope: homeless people and migrants, prisoners and transgender people.
“The poor have a privileged place in the heart of God,” the Vatican quoted Francis as saying in explaining the choice.
A special relationship with the basilica
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, to which Francis was particularly devoted.
He would pray before it before and after each of his foreign trips as pope.
The choice of the basilica is 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.
Crowds waited hours to bid farewell to Francis
Over three days this week, more than 250,000 people stood for hours in line to pay their final respects while Francis’ body lay in state in St Peter’s Basilica.
The Vatican kept the basilica open through the night to accommodate them, but it wasn’t enough. When the doors closed to the general public at 7pm yesterday (3am today AEST), mourners were turned away in droves.
By dawn Saturday, they were back and ready to say a final farewell, some recalling the words he uttered the very first night of his election and throughout his papacy.
“We are here to honour him because he always said ‘don’t forget to pray for me,'” said Sister Christiana Neenwata from Biafrana, Nigeria.
“So we are also here to give to him this love that he gave to us.”