How Pope Francis was buried

Vatican, Rome | THE INDEPENDENT & VATICAN NEWS | Pope Francis was buried in the side aisle of the Basilica of St Mary Major, between the Pauline Chapel, where his beloved icon of Our Lady ‘Salus Populi Romani’ is located, and the Sforza Chapel.

The Pope is the first in over a century to be buried outside the Vatican, and his entombment was a private event, allowing for those closest to him to pay their respects.

The Pope’s burial rite was preceded by the singing of four psalms and accompanied by five intercessions, and then the Our Father was chanted. After the final prayer, the sigils of the Cardinal Camerlengo of the Holy Roman Church, Kevin Joseph Farrell, of the Prefecture of the Papal Household, of the Office of Liturgical Celebrations of the Roman Pontiff and of the Liberian Chapter were printed on the coffin.

Afterwards, the coffin was placed in the tomb and sprinkled with holy water while the Regina Caeli was chanted. Then there was the final formality: the notary of the Liberian Chapter read the act certifying the burial to those present. It was then signed by the Cardinal Camerlengo, the Regent of the Papal Household, Monsignor Leonardo Sapienza, and by the Master of Pontifical Liturgical Celebrations, Archbishop Diego Ravelli.

Pope Francis’ decision to be buried in the Papal Basilica of Saint Mary Major is “surprising… but not novel,” according to historian Donald Prudlo.

“But over the course of 266 pontiffs, there have been numerous burial places,” says historian Donald Prudlo, Warren Professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Tulsa.

“When a Catholic thinks about the death of the Pope, they tend to gravitate to St. Peter’s,” he told Vatican News. “And it’s true that more than half of the popes in the Church’s history are laid to rest within Saint Peter’s,” dating back to the original church structure built by Constantine, the first Christian emperor.

In the past 200 years, two Popes—Pius IX in the wake of the Italian Risorgimento, and Leo XIII, his immediate successor—found their final resting places in Roman churches, St. Lawrence Outside the Walls and St. John Lateran, respectively.

And over the centuries, various Popes were laid to rest in different Italian cities, in France (during the period Popes resided at Avignon), and even as far away as Germany and Ukraine.

Prudlo notes that Pope Francis is the eighth Roman Pontiff whose final resting place lies within the walls of the Papal Basilica of Saint Mary Major.

“There were some from the Middle Ages, Honorius III and Nicholas IV,” he said, before becoming “a particular place of papal burial in the 16th century.”

Two popes in particular—Pius V, a Dominican; and Sixtus V, a Franciscan—have been joined by the first Jesuit Pope. “So in a lot of ways,” said Prudlo, it’s a place particularly friendly to the religious orders.”

However, he continued, the largest and oldest church in Rome dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary, is also marked by a special Marian devotion,” the devotion, so loved and valued by Pope Francis and by the Roman people, to the Icon of Mary under the title of “Salus Populi Romani.”

Pope Francis’ has been interred in a niche directly adjacent to the chapel housing the icon.