Pope Francis, who sought a more pastoral church, laid to rest in a majestic ceremony; Trump, Biden attend

Vatican City • In a solemn and majestic funeral on the steps of St. Peter’s Basilica, the Roman Catholic Church on Saturday laid to rest Pope Francis, the first South American pope, whose simple style, pastoral vision and outsize footprint on the world stage reinvigorated and divided the institution that he led for a dozen years.

Heads of state, royals and religious leaders sat with an array of Catholic prelates in brilliant red robes around a closed cypress coffin holding the body of Francis, who died Monday at 88. Atop his coffin, the pages of an open book of the Gospels fanned in the breeze.

(Eric Lee | The New York Times) The simple coffin of Pope Francis lies in St. Peter's Square for his funeral, in Vatican City on Saturday, April 26, 2025.

Hundreds of thousands of faithful filled and spilled out of St. Peter’s Square and streamed down the long avenue to the Tiber River. In the previous days, about 250,000 waited in long lines to say farewell to the pope, whose body was dressed in red vestments and scuffed black shoes as he lay in state before the basilica’s altar.

“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,” Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, dean of the College of Cardinals, said in his homily during Saturday’s requiem Mass.

As the cardinals arrayed around him prepared to head into a conclave next month to choose Francis’ successor, Re avoided obvious political overtones but highlighted Francis’ pastoral and inclusive approach and his humble style as key to the esteem in which Francis was held inside and outside the church.

Francis had spread the faith with a sense of joy, a “great spontaneity and an informal way of addressing everyone,” he said, and a spirit of “welcome and listening.” But Francis also “truly shared the anxieties, sufferings and hopes of this time of globalization.”

Francis, perhaps the world’s loudest voice for the voiceless, leaves the world at a moment of flux, when the migrants he championed are undergoing mass deportations, the authoritarianism he warned against is on the rise, and the post-World War II alliances he hoped would provide peace are turning upside down. In a way, Saturday’s funeral amounted to a final act for a pope who sought until the end to bring people together.

President Donald Trump, whose Christianity Francis once questioned, was there, as was Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and they met inside St. Peter’s Basilica before the funeral, in what the White House called a “very productive discussion.”

Also attending the funeral were European heads of state and leaders of the European Union, which Trump has said was “formed in order to screw the United States.” There were also leaders of many of the countries Francis visited — some of whom he implored to make peace or to do a better job defending human rights. Former President Joe Biden, a Catholic whom Francis once told he could accept Communion despite his support for abortion rights, sat with other dignitaries.

Beside the coffin, sprinkled with holy water by Re, the cardinals who will choose the next pontiff were somber with prayer and the burden of the coming conclave to pick the 267th leader of the church. With that choice, they will also decide whether the church follows or veers away from Francis’ vision of a church that puts more emphasis on mercy and inclusion than on rules and doctrine.

Some of them want to go further toward allowing women to be deacons or male priests to marry; others want to pull back. Some want to reach into Asia or Africa for a new pope to spread the faith; others want to bring the papacy back home to Italy to get the house in order after an eventful and, at times, destabilizing pontificate.

But on Saturday, all the attention was on Francis, the Argentine of Italian heritage, born as Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who was raised in a humble neighborhood in Buenos Aires, Argentina, became a Jesuit priest and rose to the pinnacle of the church. Once there, he tried to break the church out of its walls after decades of conservative rule and bring it closer to the 1.3 billion faithful where they were, geographically and in how they lived their lives.

“He was a pope among the people, with an open heart toward everyone,” Re said, standing behind Francis’ coffin on the steps of St. Peter’s Square. “He was also a pope attentive to the signs of the times and what the Holy Spirit was awakening in the church.”

Francis, who took the name of the medieval saint who dedicated his life to the poor, was a pope of gestures and symbols that amplified his vision of a more humble church. He paid his own hotel bill after his election as pope; he rode around in simple cars; he washed the feet of criminals and ate with the destitute in soup kitchens.

Francis asked to be buried in a basilica across town, next to an icon of the Virgin Mary that he venerated, in a simple, undecorated tomb marked with the inscription, “Franciscus,” his name in Latin. The coffin contains commemorative medals and coins minted during his papacy; a short text describing his pontificate in a metal tube; and the episcopal palliums, the white wool vestments worn around the neck that symbolize a bishop’s ecclesiastical jurisdiction.

During the funeral homily, Re noted that the enduring image of Francis would be from Easter Sunday, the day before his death, when, despite the fact that he was obviously ailing, he came to a balcony overlooking St. Peter’s Square to deliver his blessing and then went down to greet the crowd, in a final trip in his popemobile.

Recalling that Francis often ended talks with an invitation to pray for him, the cardinal concluded, “Dear Pope Francis, we now ask you to pray for us.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.