In today’s newsletter, the ritualistic sights and scenes at Pope Francis’s funeral. Plus:
Photograph by Antonio Masiello / Getty
Paul Elie
Reporting from Vatican City
I watched the funeral for Pope Francis from atop the braccio, or “arm,” extending up and outward to the left of St. Peter’s Basilica. Seated among some of the many photographers and their gear, on a bench that runs behind a balustrade, I shared my view with the stone statues perched on the balustrade—figures who have witnessed plenty of pomp and circumstance throughout the centuries.
To see the ceremony from this height was to see how little the Vatican changes. A large candlestick wheeled into place, rows of red seats accented with gold, cardinals filing in like pupils at a school assembly—it was as if nothing had been altered since I watched the funeral for Pope John Paul II from a high place on the other side of the basilica, twenty years ago. Francis’s service reflected a few changes that he had requested: a plainer wooden coffin than what was typical for most recent Popes, and entombment not in St. Peter’s but in another Roman basilica, St. Mary Major. But on the whole—clerics dressed in red and white and world leaders in black, the coffin borne out of the basilica in a gravid procession, the mingled sounds of tolling bells and helicopter rotors—the proceedings were very familiar.
Photograph by Paul Elie for The New Yorker
The scarcely changing spectacle pointed up just how unlikely Francis’s achievement was. In the twelve years after Jorge Mario Bergoglio, of Buenos Aires, was introduced as Pope Francis and asked the people listening to “pray for me,” he brought his personal openness and spontaneity to the entire Church. And he did so while remaining himself, a person not defined by the papal role. To lead any large, old, storied institution flexibly and expressively is an achievement. To lead this one that way is to defy gravity.
Up there on the braccio, just six days after Francis gave an Easter blessing from the loggia, his vivid pontificate felt distant, and the man who suggested he’d been called to the papacy from “the end of the earth” seemed far away. As the photographers collapsed their monopods and the crowd, estimated at more than two hundred and fifty thousand people, withdrew from St. Peter’s Square, I recalled a Mass for Francis I’d attended at the Gesù, a church run by the Society of Jesus, the order to which he belonged. There, beneath a ceiling depicting heavenly figures, the order’s Superior General, Father Arturo Sosa, ended his eulogy, in Italian, with an observation: Francis began his pontificate by asking us to pray for him; now he is praying for us. It’s far from certain that the openness Francis brought to the Church will outlast him, or that the new Pope will make the most of it. But it has been a good thing for these twelve years, and the oft-made charge that Francis dismantled Catholic tradition was resplendently refuted today.
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P.S. Ma Rainey, a.k.a. the Mother of the Blues, was born on this day in 1886. She was the inspiration for “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” one of many plays by August Wilson which brought to the stage Black American culture and history. Revisit John Lahr’s Profile of the playwright, from 2001. “Wilson’s work,” Lahr writes, “is a conscious answer to James Baldwin’s call for ‘a profound articulation of the Black Tradition.’ ”
