“It’s like saying farewell to a grandfather': Devotees and tourists have been lining up to see the body of Pope Benedict
lay before the main altar of St. Peter’s Basilica on Monday, his head resting on a pair of velvet cushions, his face waxy and ashen, with rosary beads entwined through his folded hands. The twisting baroque columns of Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s altar canopy towered behind., wore a bishop’s miter but, unlike his predecessor, St. John Paul II, when he lay in state, not the woolen cloak around his neck signifying papal office.
Ms. Mayr, from the town of Ritten in northern Italy, was visiting Rome on vacation with some of her fellow high-school students. They had come to see the monument, not the man, but joined the line of mourners because it was the only way into the basilica.after a decade in retirement.Grzegorz Galazka/Zuma Press
At Mass on Sunday in an ordinary parish in northern Rome, the only reference to Benedict, the city’s former bishop, was his inclusion on a list of the dead for whom the faithful were asked to pray. The priest invited the congregation to a concert in the church on Thursday evening, but didn’t mention the retired pope’s funeral in St. Peter’s Square that morning.
“I came to thank God for the gift of Benedict,” said the Rev. Carlos Augusto da Silva of Rio de Janeiro, a doctoral student in Rome who paid his respects to the late pope at St. Peter’s on Monday.
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