VATICAN CITY (AP) – Bells tolled Thursday for the funeral of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, the German theologian who made history by retiring, as thousands of mourners gathered in St. Peter’s Square for a rare Mass requiem of a deceased pontiff presided over by a living one. one.
The faithful cheered as pallbearers brought Benedict’s cypress coffin out of the fog-shrouded St. Peter’s Basilica and placed it in front of the altar. As the red-robed clergy looked on, Benedict’s longtime secretary, Archbishop Georg Gaenswein, bent down and kissed a book of the Gospels that lay open on the casket.
Heads of state and royalty, clergy from around the world and thousands of ordinary people gathered at the Vatican, despite Benedict’s calls for simplicity and official efforts to hold the first funeral of an emeritus pope in modern times.
Many were from Benedict’s native Bavaria and wore traditional clothing, including boiled woolen coats to protect themselves from the morning chill.
“We came to pay our respects to Benedict and we wanted to be here today to say goodbye,” said Raymond Mainar, who traveled from a small village east of Munich for the funeral. “He was a very good pope.”
The former Joseph Ratzinger, who died on December 31 at the age of 95, is considered one of the greatest theologians of the 20th century and spent his entire life upholding Church doctrine. But he will go down in history for a singular and revolutionary act that changed the future of the papacy: he retired, the first pope in six centuries to do so.
Pope Francis praised Benedict XVI’s courage in resigning, saying it “opened the door” for other popes to do the same. Francis, for his part, recently said he had already left written instructions outlining the conditions under which he too would resign.
Francis presided over the funeral, which authorities estimated was attended by about 100,000 people, up from an initial estimate of 60,000, Italian media reported, citing police security plans.
Only Italy and Germany were invited to send official delegations, but other heads of state and government accepted the Vatican’s offer and entered their “private person”. They included several other heads of state, at least four prime ministers and two delegations of royal representatives.
Matteo Colonna, a 20-year-old seminarian from Teramo, Italy, said he attended in part because of the historic nature of the funeral, but it also had personal resonance for him.
“The first spark of my vocation started under Benedict’s pontificate, but then it became even stronger under Pope Francis,” said Colonna, as he stood in prayer in St. Peter’s Square before the funeral. “I see a continuity between these two popes and the fact that today Francis celebrates the funeral in memory of Benedict is a historic event.”
On Thursday, the Vatican released the official history of Benedict’s life, a short document in Latin that was placed in a metal cylinder in his coffin before being sealed, along with coins and medallions minted during his pontificate and stolen from pallium.
The document paid particular attention to Benedict’s historic resignation and called him “pope emeritus”, quoting verbatim the Latin words spoken on February 11, 2013, when he announced his retirement.
The document, known as the “rogito” or deed, also mentioned his theological and papal heritage, including his involvement with Anglicans and Jews and his efforts to combat clerical sexual abuse by “continuously calling the church to conversion, to prayer, to penance and purification”.
The funeral ritual itself is modeled after the code used for dead popes, but with some modifications, Benedict was not a reigning pope when he died.
After the Mass, Benedict’s cypress coffin was to be placed in a zinc casket, then an outer oak casket, before being buried in the grotto crypt beneath St Peter’s Basilica, which once housed the tomb of St John Paul II before being moved. upstairs.
Although the rite is new, it has a precedent: in 1802 Pope Pius VII presided over the funeral in St. Peter’s of his predecessor Pius VI, who died in exile in France in 1799 as a prisoner of Napoleon.
About 200,000 people paid their respects to Benedict during the three days of public viewing in basilicas, one of the last, Brother Rosario Vitale, spending an hour in prayer next to his body. He said Benedict gave him a special dispensation to begin the process of becoming a priest, which was necessary because of a physical disability.
“So today I came here to pray at his grave, over his body and to say ‘thank you’ for my future priesthood, for my ministry,” he said.
Benedict never intended his retirement to last this long: at nearly 10 years, it was longer than his eight-year pontificate. And the unprecedented situation of a retired pope living alongside a reigning one has called for protocols to guide future popes emeritus to avoid any confusion about who is really in charge.
During his quarter-century as Pope under St. John Paul II, Ratzinger led a crackdown on dissent as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, cracking down on the left-wing liberation theology that swept Latin America in the 1950s 70 and against dissent. theologians and nuns who did not follow the Vatican’s hard line on issues such as sexual morality.
His legacy was marked by the clergy sex abuse scandal, even though he acknowledged before anyone else the “filth” of priests who raped children and, in fact, laid the groundwork for the Holy See to punish them.
As cardinal and pope, he promulgated sweeping ecclesiastical legislation that led to the excommunication of 848 priests between 2004 and 2014, about a year into his pontificate. But abuse survivors still held him responsible for the crisis because he did not sanction any bishops who replaced abusers and identified him as the embodiment of the clerical system that had long protected the institution from victims.
A group representing survivors of abuse by German clergy called on German officials who attended Benedict’s funeral to demand more action from the Vatican on sex abuse. Eckiger Tisch called on German leaders to ask Francis to issue a “universal ecclesiastical law” that provides zero tolerance in dealing with clergy abuse.
“Any celebration that marks the lives of those who facilitate abuse like Benedict must end,” said SNAP, America’s leading abuse survivor group.
Associated Press reporter Trisha Thomas contributed.
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