The funeral of the former pope will be presided over by his successor, Pope Francis, an unprecedented event in the history of the Vatican.
SourceAFP
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Lhe pope emeritus Benedict XVI passed away on Saturday, December 31 at the age of 95. His funeral will be held on Thursday January 5 and will be presided over by his successor, Pope Francis. The burial of a former pope is an unprecedented event in the two thousand year history of the Catholic Church. Benedict XVI will be buried in a crypt in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, the Vatican has announced.
“The coffin of the sovereign pontiff emeritus will be carried to St. Peter’s Basilica and then to the Vatican grottos (which house the papal tombs) to be buried there,” the Holy See’s press service said in a statement. The coffin of the German theologian – born Joseph Ratzinger – will be exhibited from Monday to Wednesday in Saint Peter’s Basilica to allow the faithful to gather.
End of an unusual cohabitation
Benedict XVI’s official biographer revealed in 2020 that he wanted to be buried in the tomb of John Paul II, of whom he was a close collaborator, in the crypt of Saint-Pierre. This tomb has been empty since John Paul II’s coffin was transferred to a side chapel on the occasion of his beatification in 2011. The Vatican has not said whether this would indeed be the case.
The health of the German theologian – who was head of the Catholic Church from 2005 to 2013 – had deteriorated in recent days. The announcement of his death took the faithful in St. Peter’s Square by surprise. “We are really devastated,” a 30-year-old Italian, Davide Di Tommaso, told AFP.
His death puts an end to the unusual cohabitation of two men in white: the German Joseph Ratzinger, a brilliant theologian not very comfortable with crowds, and the Argentinian Jorge Bergoglio, a Jesuit endowed with an incisive word who wanted put the poor and migrants back at the center of the Church’s mission.
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After his eight years of a pontificate marked by multiple crises, Benedict XVI had been caught up in early 2022 by the drama of pedocrime in the Church. Questioned by a report in Germany on his management of sexual violence when he was Archbishop of Munich, he broke his silence to ask for “pardon” but assured that he had never covered up child criminals.
His renunciation, announced in Latin on February 11, 2013, was a personal decision linked to his declining strength and not to the pressure of scandals, he assured in a book of confidences published in 2016. For Marco Politi, Italian Vaticanist interviewed on Saturday by AFP, Benedict XVI “was important as a theologian, but he did not have the mental profile of the role to be the pontiff”. “It’s a part of the Church’s past that disappears with him. The Conservatives have been waving their banners in a civil war for ten years against Francis. (With his death) they lose a living symbol, they can no longer say ‘here is the real pope, here is the fake’,” he said.
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