Cardinals in Rome have taken their first decisions following the death of Pope Francis, setting Saturday as the date for his funeral and allowing people to start paying their final respects from Wednesday, when his casket will be brought into St. Peter’s Basilica.
Francis died on Monday at the age of 88, after suffering a stroke that put him in a coma and led his heart to fail. He had been recovering in his apartment after being hospitalised for five weeks with pneumonia. He made his last public appearance on Sunday, delivering an Easter blessing and making what would be his final greeting to followers from his popemobile, looping around St. Peter’s Square.
Spain, historically a deeply Catholic country, has announced a period of mourning for three days, which will be of an institutional nature. Flags will fly at half-mast, yet there will be no official state event.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez on Monday (in main image with the pope in October 2024) hailed Francis’s ‘commitment to peace, social justice and the most vulnerable’.
‘I am sorry to hear of the death of Pope Francis. His commitment to peace, social justice and the most vulnerable leaves a profound legacy. Rest in peace,’ the socialist (PSOE) leader wrote on X.
Spain’s King Felipe VI lauded the Vatican’s first Jesuit Pope for his ‘conviction of the need to bring encouragement and solace to the poorest’.
‘We regret the death of a good man and a great pope. Therefore, the government of Spain will declare three days of official mourning,’ Justice Minister Félix Bolaños said in a televised address, praising Francis’s ‘reformist’ 12-year papacy that ‘will leave a legacy for history’.
Francis ‘dedicated his life to the weak, to those who have nothing … a pope characterised by his struggle against inequality, injustices, his fight against climate change and his concern for all those on the peripheries’, added Bolaños.
‘For that reason, the government of Spain has always felt close to his work and his values, especially his defence of peace,’ the minister continued.
In Spain, ‘we loved him and what his papacy meant’, said Bolaños. ‘With his papacy the Church has started to travel a path which must continue.’
Opposition leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo, head of Spain’s right-wing People’s Party (PP), described Francis as ‘the Pope who spoke Spanish and was on the verge of making a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela’.
Pope Francis never visited Spain during his time as pontiff (he did spend time in Alcalá de Henares and Mallorca before becoming Pope) but at times he did speak about the country.
In an interview with Cope radio station in 2021, he said: ‘I don’t know if Spain is fully reconciled with its own history, especially the history of the last century’ in reference to the Catalan independence movement, adding that the expression ‘national unity’ is fascinating, but ‘it will never be valued without the basic reconciliation of peoples’.
He also spoke out about the mass graves where thousands of bodies of victims of the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship, arguing that ‘a society cannot smile at the future while keeping its dead hidden’.
In 2015, Pope Francis invited a Spanish transsexual man to the Vatican after he wrote to the pontiff complaining of feeling marginalised by the Catholic Church in his home town of Plasencia after having a sex change.
The 266th Pope also showed concern about the migration crisis in the Canary Islands which has cost the lives of thousands of sub-Saharan men, women and children at sea, expressing interest in visiting the Spanish archipelago to garner more attention.
More recently, Pope Francis declared Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí ‘venerable’, bringing the designer of Barcelona’s iconic Sagrada Familia basilica closer to sainthood. ALSO READ: Vatican puts ‘God’s architect’, the Catalan Antoni Gaudí, on path to sainthood.
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