Before mourners in their thousands gather in St. Peter’s Square to grieve, before leaders from around the world arrive to pay their respects, and long before cardinals cloister themselves to consider the future, the Vatican holds a small ceremony when a pope dies.
It did so again around 8 p.m. Monday when, just over 12 hours after he died, Pope Francis was transferred from the rooms of his simple residence, a guesthouse in Vatican City, down to a chapel on the ground floor.
There, Cardinal Kevin Farrell, the cardinal chamberlain — known as the camerlengo — performed a ceremony verifying that the pope was dead, with the declaration of death read aloud. The body was placed in its coffin, with only a small number of Vatican officials and members of the pope’s family present.
These photographs, which were distributed by the Vatican, capture some of the legacy of simplicity that Francis tried to create. There is the spare setting, one unlike the ornate palace rooms where other popes lived and died. And there is the less elaborate single coffin, in line with the rules Francis instituted and his insistence on leading the Roman Catholic Church through an example of humility.
At the same time, the photos make clear that however much Francis tried to shake up the status quo, he did so cautiously. And so a look at the images reveals objects and figures that embody long-held traditions of the church.
The coffin
Last year, Francis simplified the procedures for a papal funeral, specifying that only one coffin, a wooden one lined in zinc, should be used. Past popes were interred in three nesting coffins: one of wood, a second of lead and a third of wood.
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