Pope Francis' funeral will take place on Saturday, Vatican releases images of open casket

Pope Francis' funeral to take place Saturday, 26 April at 1:30 pm (IST), Vatican confirms. The Vatican has also released images of open casket of Pope Francis, who passed away from cerebral hemorrhage on Easter Monday, 21 April.

Pope Francis, the head of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics, died at his home in the Vatican on Monday aged 88 after suffering a stroke.

According to a short statement by the Vatican, the funeral liturgy in St Peter’s square will be presided by Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, the dean of the College of Cardinals.

Following the liturgy, the coffin of Pope Francis will be taken into St Peter’s Basilica, and then to the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore for burial, as requested by Francis.

Pope Francis’ funeral will be his final humble gesture

Pope Francis' predecessor Pope Benedict had abdicated in 2013, the first pope to do so in 600 years, but he was still given a papal funeral in 2022. His embalmed body, dressed in red papal mourning robes, was laid out on a casket covered with a gold cloth and raised on a pedestal in front of the altar in St Peter’s Basilica, where people could pay tribute.

Traditional papal funerals involved dead popes having three coffins – one made out of cypress wood, one of lead and one of elm, which are placed one inside the other before the body is placed inside and then buried in the Vatican grottoes beneath St Peter’s.

But Francis shunned these rituals when he approved the simplified rules in April 2024. People will still be able to see his body in the basilica, but his remains will be placed in one simple coffin made of wood and lined with zinc, and will not be raised on a platform.

Pope Francis' coffin will remain open until the night before the funeral.

However, in an interview in late 2023, Francis said he would not be buried in the Vatican and had instead prepared his tomb at the Santa Maria Maggiore basilica in Rome’s Esquilino neighbourhood, where he went to pray before and after trips overseas.

The procession involving the transfer of Pope Francis' coffin from the Vatican to Esquilino, which would mean a journey of two or three miles through central Rome, would inevitably involve the Vatican’s Swiss Guards, the world’s smallest army, although it is unclear if a plan was drawn-up before Francis’s death.

Details of Pope's coffin procession on Wednesday

The ceremony of moving Pope Francis' coffin from Santa Marta to St Peter’s Basilica will start 9am local time on Wednesday, a note by the Vatican read.

After a moment of prayer, the procession will pass through Piazza Santa Marta and Piazza dei Protomartiri Romani, exit into St. Peter’s Square and enter the Basilica through the central door.

After the liturgy in the Basilica, pilgrims from around the world will be allowed to visit to pay their last tributes to Francis.

The prayers and the liturgy will be led by Cardinal Kevin Joseph Farrell, Camerlengo of the church, who announced Francis’s death on Monday.