VATICAN (CNS): The funeral Mass of Pope Francis will be celebrated on April 26 in St. Peter’s Square, the Vatican announced. Giovanni Battista Cardinal 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 deceased pope’s body, which was taken to the chapel of Domus Sanctae Martha, his residence, late on April 21, the day of his death, will be carried into St. Peter’s Basilica for public viewing and prayer early on April 23. The public viewing was scheduled to end late on April 25 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 originally were approved by Pope 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 31 December 2022, and Pope Francis revised and simplified them in 2024.
Kevin Cardinal Farrell, the camerlengo [chamberlain] of the Holy Roman Church, presided over a prayer service for the formal verification of the pope’s death on April 21 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.”
