Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
Follow AP's live updates of Pope Francis' funeral
VATICAN CITY (AP) - World leaders and rank-and-file Catholic faithful bade farewell to Pope Francis in a funeral Saturday that highlighted his concern for people on the peripheries and reflected his wish to be remembered as a simple pastor. Though presidents and princes attended the Mass in St. Peter's Square, prisoners and migrants welcomed Francis' coffin at his final resting place in a basilica across town.
According to Vatican estimates, some 250,000 people flocked to the funeral Mass at the Vatican and 150,000 more lined the motorcade route through downtown Rome to witness the first funeral procession for a pope in a century. They clapped and cheered "Papa Francesco" as his simple wooden coffin traveled aboard a modified popemobile to St. Mary Major Basilica, some 6 kilometers (3.5-miles) away.
As bells tolled, the pallbearers brought the coffin past several dozen migrants, prisoners and homeless people holding white roses outside the basilica. Once inside, the pallbearers stopped in front of the icon of the Virgin Mary that Francis loved. Four children deposited the roses at the foot of the altar before cardinals performed the burial rite at his tomb in a nearby niche.
"I'm so sorry that we've lost him," said Mohammed Abdallah, a 35-year-old migrant from Sudan who was one of the people who welcomed Francis to his final resting place. "Francis helped so many people, refugees like us, and many other people in the world."
Earlier, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re eulogized history's first Latin American pontiff during the Vatican Mass 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," the 91-year-old dean of the College of Cardinals said in a highly personal sermon. He drew applause from the crowd when he recounted Francis' constant concern for migrants, exemplified by celebrating Mass at the U.S.-Mexico border and traveling to a refugee camp in Lesbos, Greece, when he 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, noting that with his travels, the Argentine pontiff reached "the most peripheral of the peripheries of the world."
Despite Francis' focus on the powerless, the powerful were out in force at his funeral. U.S. President Donald Trump and former President Joe Biden, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer joined Prince William and continental European royals leading more than 160 official delegations. Argentine President Javier Milei had pride of place given Francis' nationality, even if the two didn't particularly get along and the pope alienated many in his homeland by never returning there.
In an extraordinary development, Trump and Zelenskyy met privately on the sidelines. A photo showed the two men sitting alone, facing one another and hunched over on chairs in St. Peter's Basilica, where Francis often preached the need for a peaceful end to Russia's war in Ukraine.