Hours after the death on Saturday of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, Pope Francis praised his “noble” predecessor and expressed gratitude for his life of faith and prayers, especially those offered in the nearly 10 years since the shy churchman dramatically became the first pontiff in centuries to retire from the papacy.
In his first public comments about Benedict since the Vatican announced his morning death in the monastery where the former pontiff lived out his final years, Francis spoke of his feelings over the passing, adding to tributes that poured in for his predecessor throughout the day.
During his homily at a New Year’s Eve Vespers service in St Peter’s Basilica, Francis said “thoughts go spontaneously to the very dear Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, who this morning left us.”
Photo: AP
“With deep feeling, we recall his person, so noble, so gentle,” Francis said.
“We feel in the heart so much gratitude — gratitude to God for having given him to the Church and to the world,” the pope said. “Gratitude to him, for all the good he did, and above all for his witness of faith and of prayer, especially in these last years of withdrawn life.”
“Only God knows the value and the strength of his intercession, of his sacrifices offered for the good of the Church,” Francis said softly.
The Vatican earlier said Benedict is to have the simple funeral he wanted, when Francis on Thursday morning celebrates Mass in St Peter’s Square.
The 95-year-old Benedict died in the Vatican monastery where he had resided since shortly after retiring in 2013. He had been frail for years, and the Vatican three days earlier had said Benedict’s health was worsening.
Within minutes of the announcement, words of praise and fond remembrance were offered by world leaders and religious figures.
Benedict spent two more years in papal retirement than in the actual papacy, which had begun in 2005.
While pope, Benedict was head of the independent Vatican city state, but with no such role at the time of his death, the Vatican’s funeral details reflected a scaling back of pomp and protocol. Only official delegations from Italy and Benedict’s native Germany have been invited to the funeral.
With Benedict out of the public eye for nearly a decade, the turnout of the faithful for the outdoor funeral is expected to be reduced compared with the outpouring for the last funeral of a reigning pope — St John Paul II in 2005.
Hundreds of tourists in St Peter’s Square rushed to catch a glimpse of Francis, as an aide pushed his wheelchair so he could view the life-sized creche scene and pray silently in front of it, in a Vatican tradition.
Benedict “prayed in silence, as one should do,” said Fabrizio Giambrone, a tourist from Sicily who recalled the late pontiff as a ”very good person” who lacked the “charisma” of his predecessor, St John Paul II, and of his successor, Pope Francis.
While the bells of St Peter’s Basilica did not toll to mark the death announcement, in the somber air in the small Bavarian town where Ratzinger was born in 1927, church bells tolled solemnly at St Oswald Church in Marktl am Inn, a German town near the Austrian border.
In Krakow, one of Poland’s oldest and biggest church bells that is used to mark events of national significance, the Sigismund Bell, tolled at noon.
Poland is a heavily Roman Catholic country. Polish President Andrzej Duda wrote on Twitter that Benedict’s teachings served as a “guidepost among the many winding and deceptive paths of the contemporary world.”
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