Pope Francis was laid to rest on Saturday afternoon after funeral attended by around four lakh mourners, including world leaders like Donald Trump, the French president, the UK prime minister and Indian president and scores of heads of state and heads of government from around the world.
The Pope was buried at Santa Maria Maggiore basilica following the large, elaborate funeral services.
Pope Francis "touched minds and hearts" and wanted to "build bridges, not walls", said Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, who led the funeral service
The mourners lined the streets of Rome and gathered inside St Peter's Square itself. Francis has been eulogised as “a pope among the people, with an open heart towards everyone” during a solemn funeral mass. Pope Francis "touched minds and hearts" and wanted to "build bridges, not walls", said Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, who led the funeral service
Francis, 88, died on Monday following a stroke and subsequent heart failure, setting in motion a series of centuries-old rituals and a vast, meticulously planned logistical and security operation not seen in Italy since the funeral of John Paul II in April 2005.
Under a clear blue sky, the mourners gathered in and around St Peter’s Square, with crowds stretching along the broad avenue linking the Vatican to the heart of Rome. More than 2,000 journalists from across the world travelled to the Italian capital to cover the historic occasion.
The 90-minute funeral mass, celebrated by 220 cardinals, 750 bishops and over 4,000 priests, was presided over by Italian cardinal Giovanni Battista Re. Applause rang out when he spoke of Francis’s compassion for immigrants, his constant pleas for peace, his calls for negotiations to end wars, and his steadfast commitment to addressing climate change.
The crowd also erupted into applause as the late pontiff’s simple wooden coffin was carried from the altar of the 16th-century St Peter’s Basilica — where it had lain in state for three days — by 14 white-gloved pallbearers and brought into the square for the open-air ceremony.
Amid the mourning, a significant political meeting took place. Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky, both attending the funeral, used their time in the Vatican to discuss a potential ceasefire in the war between Ukraine and Russia. Zelenskyy called the encounter “symbolic” and said it had the “potential to become historic, if we achieve joint results”.
After the funeral mass, the cardinals sealed Pope Francis’s wooden and zinc coffin with red wax. Cardinal Kevin Farrell, who as camerlengo is overseeing the Vatican’s day-to-day affairs until a new pope is elected, sprinkled holy water over the coffin as it was lowered into a tomb.
Francis had requested a simple and humble burial in keeping with the spirit of his papacy. His tomb lies in a side nave of the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, one of Rome’s oldest and most venerated churches, where he often prayed before and after his travels abroad. A reproduction of his pectoral cross hangs above the tomb, while the gravestone bears only a single inscription: “Franciscus” — the pope’s name in Latin.
Francis is the first pope to be buried there since Clement IX in 1669. In recent centuries, popes have traditionally been laid to rest within St Peter’s Basilica. Built in the 5th century under Pope Sixtus III, Santa Maria Maggiore houses some of Catholicism’s most treasured relics, including an icon of the Virgin Mary and the Christ child, attributed to Saint Luke.
