Spain’s King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia joined heads of state and world leaders at the funeral of Pope Francis on Saturday in Rome, sitting in the front row alongside US President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania.
Spain’s deputy prime ministers Yolanda Díaz and María Jesús Montero, as well as the leader of the People’s Party (PP) opposition, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, also joined the Spanish delegation attending the funeral (see image below).
As heads of one of the few remaining Catholic monarchies in Europe, Felipe and Letizia were among the first royals to confirm they would be attending the funeral following the death of Pope Francis earlier this week. ALSO READ: PM Sánchez: the Pope leaves ‘a profound legacy’, as funeral set for Saturday.
As Prince Felipe and Princess Letizia, they were among the royals who attended Pope Francis’s inaugural mass in 2013. The following year, the royal couple met with Pope Francis for a private audience in June 2014 in Vatican City.
Some 250,000 people flocked to the funeral Mass on Saturday and tens of thousands more lined the motorcade route, clapping and cheering ‘Papa Francesco’ as his simple wooden coffin travelled aboard one of his old ‘pope mobiles’ to its final resting place at St. Mary Major Basilica on the other side of the city.
Earlier, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, the 91-year-old dean of the College of Cardinals, eulogised Francis as a pope of the people, a pastor who knew how to communicate to the ‘least among us’ with an informal, spontaneous style.
‘He was a pope among the people, with an open heart towards everyone,’ Re said in a spirited and highly personal sermon. He drew applause from the crowd when he recounted Francis’ constant concern for migrants, including when he celebrated Mass at the US-Mexico border and travelled to a refugee camp in Lesbos, Greece, and brought 12 migrants home with him.
‘The guiding thread of his mission was also the conviction that the church is a home for all, a home with its doors always open,’ Re said.
Re said with his travels, including his last major trip to Asia last year, Francis reached ‘the most peripheral of the peripheries of the world’.
The Argentine pontiff choreographed the funeral himself when he revised and simplified the Vatican’s rites and rituals last year. His aim was to emphasise the pope’s role as a mere pastor and not ‘a powerful man of this world’.
Despite Francis’ focus on the powerless, the powerful were out in force at his funeral.
In addition to Trump, former US President Joe Biden, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, UN Secretary-General António Guterres, and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer joined Prince William and other European royals leading more than 160 official delegations.
Argentine President Javier Milei had the pride of place given Francis’ nationality, even if the two didn’t particularly get along and the pope alienated many Argentines by never returning home.
Trump and Zelensky met privately on the sidelines of the funeral. A photo (below) showed the two men sitting alone, facing one another and hunched over on chairs in St. Peter’s Basilica, where Francis often preached the need for a peaceful end to Russia’s war in Ukraine. It was issued by the Ukrainian Presidential Press Service.
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Los Reyes, ante el féretro de Su Santidad el Papa Francisco, junto a la delegación española.
➡️https://t.co/mhzpWbbyfb pic.twitter.com/ArhZcyyV1H
— Casa de S.M. el Rey (@CasaReal) April 26, 2025
Los Reyes han asistido a la Misa exequial por Su Santidad el Papa Francisco, en el atrio de la Basílica de San Pedro.
➡️https://t.co/mhzpWbbyfb pic.twitter.com/hDERPn3a6N
— Casa de S.M. el Rey (@CasaReal) April 26, 2025
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