When Pope John Paul II died on the evening of April 2, 2005, the whole world knew it would be coming at any moment.
He had been on his deathbed for days and the light in the window of his bedroom overlooking St. Peter’s Square had become a tangible connection with the faithful.
Twenty years later, the death of Pope Francis on Monday at the age of 88 came as a surprise even though he was still convalescing after a hospital stay for double pneumonia.
In the past few days, Francis made several public appearances. Although very brief, they sent reassuring signals that he was determined to slowly return to work.
Many Romans were out of town for the Easter holiday, so most of the people who headed to the square after hearing of his death were tourists there largely out of curiosity.
By contrast, when John Paul died, tens of thousands of people had been praying in the square all day and into the evening. Archbishop (now cardinal) Leonardo Sandri was in the papal apartments and called down to Monsignor (now Archbishop) Renato Boccardo, who was leading the rosary and about to start a procession in the Square.
Sandri told Boccardo to wait. He left the papal apartments and joined Boccardo on the steps of St. Peter’s to announce to the crowd that John Paul had “returned to the house of the father”.
The crowd cried. But it was not surprised.
Pope Benedict XVI, Francis’ immediate predecessor, died at age 95 in 2022, out of the public limelight after resigning from the papacy in 2013.
MODEST SURROUNDINGS
Francis died in his small suite in the Santa Marta guesthouse where he chose to live after his election in 2013, forsaking the spacious papal apartments in the Apostolic Palace, which looks out on to St. Peter’s Square and symbolically reaches out to the world.
The windows of Francis’ apartment look down on a small internal courtyard, close to St. Peter’s Basilica and an imposing centuries-old defensive wall that forms a border between the world’s smallest state from Rome.
With no one watching from below his windows to represent the embrace of the outside world on Monday morning, Francis died far more privately.
On Monday morning Cardinal Kevin Farrell, the camerlengo, or chamberlain, who will oversee the running of ordinary business at the Vatican for the next few weeks, announced the pope’s death on the Vatican’s TV channel.
Farrell spoke from a small room flanked by a few top Vatican officials, looking into a camera. He used the exact same words Sandri had uttered 20 years ago in a much more emotional setting.
The pope, Farrell said, had “returned to the house of the Father”.