The funeral Mass of Pope Francis will be celebrated on Saturday, April 26, in St Peter’s Square, the Vatican has announced. Source: CNS.
Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, dean of the College of Cardinals, will preside over the liturgy, which begins a nine-day period of official mourning and daily memorial Masses.
The Pope’s body will be carried into St Peter’s Basilica for public viewing and prayer early today Rome time.
The public viewing is scheduled to end late on Friday, with another prayer service to close the coffin.
The rites and rituals for dressing the body, moving it to St Peter’s Basilica and celebrating the funeral are published in the Ordo Exsequiarum Romani Pontificis (Funeral Rites of the Roman Pontiff).
The rites were first approved by St John Paul II in 1998 but were released only when he died in 2005. Modified versions of the rites were used after Pope Benedict XVI died on December 31, 2022, and Pope Francis revised and simplified them in 2024.
Cardinal Kevin Farrell, the chamberlain of the Holy Roman Church, presided over a prayer service for the formal verification of the Pope’s death on Monday in the chapel of the Domus Sanctae Marthae, where Pope Francis celebrated an early morning Mass most days before his final illness.
Cardinal Farrell will lead the prayerful procession to take the Pope’s body, already in its coffin, from the chapel into St Peter’s Square and then into the basilica.
According to the book of rites, he will say, “Dearest brothers and sisters, with great emotion we accompany the mortal remains of our Pope Francis into the Vatican basilica where he often exercised his ministry as the bishop of the Church that is in Rome and as pastor of the universal Church.”
FULL STORY
Pope’s funeral set for April 26, public viewing April 23-25 (By Cindy Wooden, CNS)
