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From Monday to Wednesday, the Catholic faithful will be able to say a last farewell to Pope Emeritus Benoit XVI, who died on Saturday, and whose remains will be exposed under the gold of Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome. His funeral will take place on Thursday.
The body of Benedict XVI, died Saturday at age 95is on display from Monday, January 2 in the morning under the gilding of Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome, where the faithful will be able to pay him a last homage before his funeral Thursday.
The doors of the huge basilica will be open to the public from 9 a.m. until 7 p.m., then from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday. Admission is free and does not require the reservation of tickets, said the Vatican, which has put in place an important security device for the occasion.
The body of Joseph Ratzinger had remained so far in the small private chapel of the monastery where he lived since his renunciation in 2013, located in the heart of the Vatican gardens.
“Faithful servant of the Gospel and of the Church”
The Vatican released on Sunday the first photos of the body of the pope emeritus, lying on a catafalque, dressed in red – the color of papal mourning – and wearing a white miter adorned with a golden braid, a rosary in his hands. A crucifix, a Christmas tree and a nativity scene are visible in the background.
The transfer of his body to St. Peter’s Basilica, the largest Catholic church in the world that can accommodate tens of thousands of worshippers, will take place at dawn on Monday.
The basilica, a masterpiece of architecture combining Renaissance and Baroque styles, completed in 1626, is also one of the holiest places in Christianity, since it houses the tomb of Saint Peter, the first bishop of Rome whose popes are the successors.
On Sunday, Pope Francis once once more paid homage to “beloved” Benedict XVI, “that faithful servant of the Gospel and of the Church”.
Brilliant theologian and fervent guardian of dogma, Benedict XVI, who had resigned in 2013 because of his declining strength, died peacefully on Saturday morning.
Unpublished event
The funeral celebrated by Francis for his predecessor, at the head of the Catholic Church from 2005 to 2013, will constitute an unprecedented event in the two-thousand-year history of the Catholic Church, and will put an end to the unusual cohabitation of the two men in white.
The ceremony, “solemn but sober” according to the Vatican, will be held Thursday from 9:30 a.m. in St. Peter’s Square, where the funeral of his predecessor John Paul II had attracted a million people in 2005. The first pope German in modern history will then be buried in a crypt in the basilica.
Benedict XVI’s last words, spoken in Italian hours before his death on Saturday in the presence of a nurse at his bedside, were: “Lord, I love you,” his private secretary, Bishop Georg Gänswein, reported to the Vatican. News, the official news site of the Holy See.
With AFP
