Thousands congregate in Vatican for subdued ceremony
POPE Francis joined tens of thousands of faithful in bidding farewell to Benedict XVI at a rare requiem Mass yesterday for a dead pope presided over by a living one, ending an unprecedented decade for the Catholic Church that was sparked by the German theologian’s decision to retire.
Bells tolled and the crowd applauded as pallbearers carried Benedict’s cypress coffin out of the fog-shrouded St Peter’s Basilica and placed it before the altar outside.
Wearing the crimson vestments
‘We wanted to say goodbye’
typical of papal funerals, Francis opened the service with a prayer and closed it by solemnly blessing the casket – decorated only with the former pope’s coat of arms.
In between, Francis made only fleeting reference to Benedict in his homily, offering a meditation on Christ instead of a eulogy of his predecessor’s legacy before the casket was sealed and entombed in the basilica grotto.
Heads of state and royalty, clergy from around the world and thousands of ordinary people flocked to the subdued ceremony, despite Benedict’s request for simplicity and official efforts to keep the first funeral for a pope emeritus in modern times low-key.
Many mourners hailed from Benedict’s native Bavaria and donned traditional dress, including boiled wool coats to guard against the morning chill.
‘We came to pay homage to Benedict and wanted to be here today to say goodbye,’ said Raymond Mainar, who travelled from a small village near Munich for the funeral. ‘He was a very good pope.’
Ignoring exhortations for decorum at the end, some in the crowd held banners or shouted ‘Santo Subito!’ – ‘Sainthood Now!’ – echoing the chants that erupted during St John Paul II’s 2005 funeral.
The former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who died on December 31 aged 95, spent his lifetime upholding Church doctrine. But he will go down in history for a revolutionary act that changed the future of the papacy: He retired, the first pope in six centuries to do so.
Some 50,000 people attended yesterday’s Mass, according to the Vatican, after around 200,000 paid their respects during three days of public viewing.
Only Italy and Germany were invited to send official delegations, but other leaders took the Vatican up on its offer and came in their ‘private capacity.’
They included several heads of state, at least four prime ministers and two delegations of royal representatives. In addition, a host of patriarchs joined 125 cardinals in the seats to the side of the altar, and the Russian Orthodox Church sent its foreign envoy.
The former pope’s longtime secretary, Archbishop Georg Gaenswein, bent down and kissed a book of the Gospels that was left on the coffin before the ceremony began.
With Francis in place as pontiff,
Benedict’s death marked the end of a decade in which a reigning pope lived alongside a retired one.
‘Benedict has been the bridge between John Paul and Francis,’ said Alessandra Aprea, 56, from outside Naples. ‘We could not have Francis without him.’
Francis uttered Benedict’s name only once, in the final line, delivering instead a meditation on Jesus’ willingness to entrust himself to God’s will.
‘Holding fast to the Lord’s last words and to the witness of his entire life, we too, as an ecclesial community, want to follow in his steps and to commend our brother into the hands of the Father,’ Francis said.
During St. John Paul II’s quartercentury as pope, Ratzinger spearheaded a crackdown on dissent as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, taking action against the left-leaning liberation theology that spread in Latin America in the 1970s and against dissenting theologians and nuns who didn’t toe the Vatican’s line on matters like sexual morals.
His legacy was marred by the
‘We could not have Francis without him’
clergy sexual abuse crisis, even though he recognised earlier than most the ‘filth’ of priests who raped children, and laid the groundwork for the Holy See to punish them.
As cardinal and pope, he passed sweeping Church laws that resulted in 848 priests being defrocked from 2004 to 2014, roughly his pontificate with a year on either end.
But abuse survivors still held him responsible, for failing to sanction any bishop who moved abusers around, refusing to mandate the reporting of sex crimes and they identified him as embodying the clerical system that protected the institution over victims.
Mike McDonnell of the US abuse survivor group SNAP said while Benedict passed new canon laws, he could have done far more to influence John Paul to take firm action.
A group representing German clergy abuse survivors called on German officials at Benedict’s funeral to demand more action from the Vatican on sexual abuse. Eckiger Tisch asked leaders to demand that Francis issue a ‘universal Church law’ stipulating zero tolerance.
After the Mass, Benedict’s cypress coffin was placed inside a zinc one, then an outer oak casket before being entombed in the crypt in the grottoes underneath St. Peter’s Basilica.
While yesterday’s Mass was unusual, it has some precedent: In 1802, Pope Pius VII presided over the funeral in St Peter’s of his predecessor, Pius VI, who had died in exile in France in 1799 as a prisoner of Napoleon.
‘We too want to follow in his steps’