Pope Francis was laid to relaxation in Rome on Saturday with a shifting, multi-lingual ceremony that mirrored his humble strategy to the papacy and the worldwide adoration he loved because the “People’s Pope.”

Tons of of hundreds of individuals gathered on the streets round St. Peter’s Sq. within the Vatican to pay their remaining respects to a person whose message, from the very first days of his papacy in March 2013 to his final on 21 April 2025, was that the church was a house for all—regardless of their race, class, faith, or sexual orientation.

Presidents, cardinals, key world figures, and royalty attended the requiem mass held in entrance of St. Peter’s Basilica as Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re eulogized a person who spoke to everybody “particularly to the marginalized, the least amongst us.”

“Wealthy in human heat and deeply delicate to immediately’s challenges, Pope Francis really shared the anxieties, sufferings, and hopes of this time of globalization,” Re instructed an viewers that included President Donald Trump, former President Joe Biden, Britain’s Prince William, French President Emmanuel Macron, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

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The proceedings had been broadcast on giant screens arrange alongside the Tiber River and all through town to accommodate the mass crowds. Sister Margaret Wyrodek, of Poland, tells TIME that she wished to accompany Pope Francis on his remaining journey as a result of he had accompanied so many via their very own troublesome journeys. “He was the parish priest to the entire world,” she says. “He comforted the marginalized, the poor, the individuals who had been abused, the individuals on the sidelines.”

Born Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Pope Francis was the previous Archbishop of Buenos Aires and the primary non-European Pontiff in additional than 1,200 years. He was a person beloved for his genial humility and the way he ushered the Catholic Church into a up to date period by preaching tolerance for people who the church had lengthy denigrated. “He made it clear that every one are welcome at God’s desk,” says Patrick Gallagher, a homosexual American who has lived in Rome for the previous 15 years. “Due to Francis, I lastly felt I might be a Catholic once more.”

Among the many mourners clustered alongside the riverbank subsequent to the Vatican had been scores of youths carrying shiny inexperienced T-shirts and scarves. That they had deliberate to return to Rome on a particular pilgrimage that was to culminate with a papal viewers and the now-postponed canonization of Carlo Acutis, a British-born Italian who died of leukemia aged 15 in 2006. Acutis grew to become referred to as the “millennial saint” for his devotion to the church and impressed a brand new technology of Catholics worldwide. As an alternative, they arrived simply in time for the Pope’s funeral. “I’m dissatisfied,” says 15-year-old Julie Brugnoni, who landed in Rome on Thursday with a delegation of youngsters from the northern Italian city of Cremona. “I used to be so excited to fulfill Pope Francis, as a result of he beloved youngsters. As an alternative, we’re right here to say goodbye.”

The youngsters appreciated Pope Francis’ dedication to elevating consciousness of local weather change, particularly the way it impacts youthful generations. In 2015, the Pope revealed a landmark encyclical letter to the Catholic congregation, lamenting environmental degradation and world warming, and warning of “severe penalties for all of us” if such traits had been to proceed. “He preached that if we would like a greater world, we should shield God’s creation,” says Alberto Razzetti, 15.

The group fell silent as they watched the proceedings on a display arrange on the piazza. Pallbearers wearing black fits hoisted Pope Francis’ coffin on their shoulders. The straightforward wooden coffin, lined with zinc and marked with a white cross, symbolized one other departure from church custom.

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Traditionally, Popes have been buried in three-tiered caskets made from cypress, lead, and oak and entombed below ornate marble fixtures in St. Peter’s Basilica. However Francis, who had taken a vow of poverty as a Jesuit priest, sometimes shunned the trimmings of papal luxurious. That vow prolonged to his dying. Final yr, he amended the rules for papal funerals, simplifying the method and ushering a extra humble strategy into the Catholic Church, one thing that additional endeared him to his followers.

“It’s simply one other demonstration that the trimmings of wealth are price nothing on this world,” says Ricardo Montalto, an aged Italian man who sought refuge from the intense solar below a store awning in the course of the funeral proceedings. “Below God, we’re all the identical, whether or not we’re cardinals, migrants, or poor.”

The pallbearers loaded the coffin right into a white pickup truck, which commenced a gradual journey out of St. Peter’s Sq., adopted by hundreds of mourners. Pope Francis laid out in his will that he didn’t wish to be buried within the Vatican like most of his predecessors, however at Santa Maria Maggiore, a basilica on the opposite facet of Rome close to the central prepare station. The church is a Baroque jewel in an space populated by migrants, the homeless, and the poor—the individuals Francis had lengthy sought to uplift. He made some extent to wish on the basilica earlier than and after each international journey, and sometimes requested to cease there at any time when he was on his method house from his more and more frequent hospital stays.

Sister Maria Rose Pellicioli, an Italian nun from a faculty for the poor outdoors of Rome, waited close to the steps of Santa Maria Maggiore for the funeral procession to reach. She first met Pope Francis 12 years in the past when she introduced a bunch of her college students for an viewers, and believes that his blessing has stored her and her college students secure ever since. Coming to bid him farewell, she says, was her method of thanking him for all that he had completed for the world. For Pellicioli, the day was bittersweet. “We’ve pleasure that we knew him, and ache that we’ve misplaced him. However he’s coming house to God, and on this method he stays with us,” she says.

Pope Francis’ dedication to outreach and inclusion was underscored by a hand-picked honor guard of migrants, Muslims, the homeless, prisoners, and transgender individuals who awaited his arrival at Santa Maria Maggiore. They had been among the many final to bid farewell because the pallbearers mounted the steps to deposit the coffin in a plain marble tomb marked with the straightforward inscription “Franciscus.”

The precise burial, subsequent to a chapel containing a famed Byzantine icon portray of the Madonna and baby, was closed to the general public. Outdoors, the gang began drifting away, with ideas turning to the long run chief of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics.

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Within the coming days, the School of Cardinals will collect in Rome for a conclave to elect Francis’ successor. The subsequent Pope might prolong Francis’ progressive legacy or return the church to the extra dogmatic custom embraced by his predecessors.