Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI used to be laid to relaxation in a vault underneath the Vatican after a carrier led by means of Pope Francis and attended by means of 50,000 other people together with heads of presidency and royal visitors.
The Vatican estimates than 200,000 other people had attended the three-day vigil for the 95-year-old, who had introduced his retirement from administrative center in 2013.
Francis made handiest fleeting connection with Benedict in his homily, providing a meditation on Christ as an alternative of a eulogy of his predecessor’s legacy prior to the casket used to be sealed and entombed within the basilica grotto.
“Holding fast to the Lord’s last words and to the witness of his entire life, we too, as an ecclesial community, want to follow in his steps and to commend our brother into the hands of the Father,” Francis stated.
Many mourners hailed from Benedict’s local Bavaria and donned conventional get dressed, together with coats to protect in opposition to the morning relax.
The former Joseph Ratzinger, who died on December thirty first, is thought of as one of the most twentieth century’s biggest theologians and spent his lifetime upholding church doctrine. But he’s going to move down in historical past for a novel, progressive act that modified the way forward for the papacy.
Francis has praised Benedict’s braveness in stepping apart.
A choir’s hymn echoed within the crypt because the casket used to be reduced into the bottom, that includes Benedict’s papal coat of palms, a go and a plaque noting in Latin that it contained his frame: “Corpus Benedicti XVI PM,” for “pontifex maximus” or “supreme pontiff.”
While Thursday’s Mass used to be bizarre, it does have some precedent: In 1802, Pope Pius VII presided over the funeral in St. Peter’s of his predecessor, Pius VI, who had died in exile in France in 1799 as a prisoner of Napoleon.
