The mist that surrounds the dome of Saint Peter’s Basilica on Thursday morning January 5 is gradually lifting. Standing, while his knee pains force him to move around in a wheelchair, François waits for the coffin that the sediari, the carriers designated to accompany Benedict XVI, who died on December 31 at 95, to his final resting place, advance towards him. . The Pope lays a hand on the beer and leans over, in a sign of contemplation. A last tribute to his predecessor, whose funeral he has just presided over. The two popes who lived together in the Vatican, in an unprecedented situation, for almost ten years, face each other. One stays, the other leaves.
A few tens of minutes earlier, Francis delivered his homily in front of tens of thousands of people gathered in Saint Peter’s Square. On his right, cardinals and prelates, an impressive floor of white and red which contrasts with the obligatory black in the square opposite, where the personalities who came in a “private capacity” took their places. The funeral of Benedict XVI, pope emeritus since his resignation in 2013, is not a state event, only representatives of the Italian and German governments (homeland of Joseph Ratzinger) have been officially invited.
In mourning dress, the kings and queens of Spain and Belgium, the presidents of Lithuania, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia and Togo are present. France was represented by Gérald Darmanin, the Minister of the Interior in charge of worship.
A great theologian
On the other side of the barriers, facing the basilica, a crowd of faithful came to attend the first funeral of a pope in almost twenty years. Place Saint-Pierre, which can accommodate 60,000 people, was only two-thirds full on Thursday. About 50,000 people made the trip, according to the authorities, against 65,000 expected. Very far from the crowd recorded during the funeral of John Paul II in 2005, when a million people had made the trip. In the previous days, they had also been several hundred thousand, up to six hundred thousand a day, to come to meditate in front of the remains of Karol Wojtyla inside Saint Peter’s Basilica.
None of that for Benoît. They were 200,000 to meditate during the three days when his body was exposed. Admittedly, John Paul II died in the exercise of his function, when Joseph Ratzinger remained cloistered to him for ten years in the Mater Ecclesiae monastery, within the walls of the Vatican, but the event seems to confirm that Benedict XVI, a great theologian and major thinker of Catholicism in the XXe century, remained less popular than its predecessor. If he was appreciated within the curia and in conservative circles, he was less appreciated outside the institution, unlike his successor Francis.
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