Photo: Vatican Media
The crowds are quieter this time. By comparison with the enormous throng of people – most of them Poles – who came to see Pope John Paul II lying in St Peter’s Basilica, the thousands queuing to pay their respects to Pope Benedict are fewer but even more diverse.
I met a family from Brisbane who brought their girls Isla and Alysa, 6 and 14, to see a moment of history: “it’s very special.” Two slightly disgruntled Finns had come to see the basilica and hadn’t intended to see a former pope lying-in-state. A couple of Indians from Kerala working in Rome were there; so was a group of Brazilian nuns from the order of the Incarnate Word, an Indonesian sister who felt Pope Benedict had set the Church on the right course and a young American (Catholic “until Eighth Grade”) whose school trip had found itself in Rome quite serendipitously.
And the Queen Sofia of Spain. Just before the last of the requiem masses there was a flurry of activity on the part of the attendants and then there was a cardinal conversing with what one Spaniard called the Queen Emerita: “she’s the best,” he said. That’s just the start; tomorrow there will be government and diplomatic representatives. Chris Trott, the UK Ambassador to the Holy See, will be accompanying Gillian Keegan, the Education Secretary to the funeral itself. “The UK Government has a friendly regard for Pope Benedict,” he said. “He came to Britain; that made a difference."
Inside the basilica there were more bishops than you could count; I did count seven cardinals including Reinhard Marx from Germany, blessing a kneeling woman. There was a bewildering variety of religious. A group of Oratorians from Vienna were standing apart from the main crowd – two called Philipp. They felt the legacy of Benedict was going to last. “He felt strongly about the beauty of the liturgy,” said one Philipp, the younger. “That’s important.” The other Philipp reflected on his defence of the Tridentine Rite. “He said that something that was holy at one point cannot be unholy at another. That’s just logic.” Philipp the Younger thought too that Benedict had expressed the joy of faith. “It matters,” he said.
There was a Greek Orthodox priest there too, Fr Stephanos from Greece, who had taken part in the colloquiums that Pope Benedict, as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, had set up to promote scholarly dialogue with the Orthodox churches. “He was a friend to the Orthodox church,” he said. “And he himself was a very humble man, a very prayerful man.”
Alas, the mortal remains of the late Pope Emeritus, over which the Swiss Guards in their Renaissance stripes keep vigil, look awful. His body is tiny, his face dark grey. “I don’t know how much make up they’ve put on him,” said Fr John, a Franciscan conventual friar, “but he’s unrecognisable. Even his hands are black.” The body looks waxen, like a doll. Fr John pointed out the figure of his colleague, Fr Rocco, who sat apart saying his breviary, who was one of Benedict's confessors. “It makes a difference that the pope went to confession just like the rest of us.” The archbishop who said one of the requiem masses spoke of his “dynamism” but also his “<em>caritas</em>”, his love. That’s something to remember while his frail little body is being honoured by the crowds today and laid to rest tomorrow.
