It should have been the calm after the `storm’ in St Peter’s Square on Sunday. Not so. An estimated 250,000 people had attended the funeral of Pope Francis on Saturday.
The following day, 200,000 young people took part in a Jubilee of Teenagers there. `Calm’ was not the word. It was the second of nine Masses that follow the death of a Pope, to be held until May 4th in this case.
The celebrant was Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Vatican Secretary of State throughout the Francis papacy. He described the pope to the young people as “a shining witness of a Church that bends down with tenderness towards those who are wounded and heals with the balm of mercy”.
Cardinal Parolin (70) is yet another tipped to be next Pope. Soon all 135 elector cardinals will gather.
Many of the young people would have been in St Peter’s Square on Sunday anyhow, as it had been planned to canonise Carlo Acutis. With the death of Pope Francis that was postponed. Acutis was from Milan and died from leukaemia in 2006 aged 15.
A devout kid with a keen interest in websites, he has already been dubbed “God’s influencer” and will be the Catholic church’s first millennial saint.
Downtown Rome was crowded with people on Sunday, with more queues, outside the Basilica of St Mary Major where Francis is buried. He is the seventh pope laid to rest there, the first in 357 years since the funeral of Clement IX in 1669.
It is a spectacularly beautiful building inside. Francis’s grave is minimal, basic, almost austere. A single white rose lies on the stone slab that bears the name “Franciscus”, with a crucifix above, on a plain lit by a single spotlight.
All so calm and serene. Very different from the Bernini colonnade on top of which the world’s media gathered on Saturday to cover the funeral on the Square below, between the statues of St Timothy and the unfortunate St Sebastian with iron arrows penetrating his torso, illustrating how he died.
It was there where mere reporters observed the scene below, as senior prelates dressed as Solomon in all his glory baked in warm sunshine, despite the assertive attentions of a phalanx of cameramen and photographers well-armed with tripods and gear.
Foolhardiness, not bravery, was necessary to venture through to the balustrade, the better to observe for readers’ sake the spectacular scene below. At times it seemed likely tripods might penetrate reporters’ torsos too, and not necessarily in sympathy with the unfortunate St Sebastian.
It’s true, a picture is worth a thousand words, but nobody wants that many these days.
Yet reporters must continue to record, even if it means going where angels would not, for the glory of the word.
