Morto un papa non se ne fa un altro

Several idiomatic phrases in Italian revolve around the papacy: there is la fumata bianca, “the white smoke” which comes from the burning of ballots which announces the successful election of a pope and is used in newspaper headlines in broader terms to refer to something getting the go-ahead; ho fatto trenta, faccio trentuno, “I’ve made thirty, I’ll make thirty-one” roughly translates as “in for a penny in for a pound”, and is attributed to Paul III whose creation of multiple cardinals in the sixteenth century was tentatively questioned by his brave advisor; and then, of course, there is morto un papa se ne fa un’altro, literally “when a pope dies another is created”, which translates more idiomatically as “the King is dead, long live the King”: no one is irreplaceable.

However this time the saying doesn’t stand, and when Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI died at the age of ninety-five on the last day of 2022 there was no talk of conclaves, or papabili (literally “popeables” or likely candidates), another term also in common usage from political elections to job interviews, because in an unprecedented historical oddity there have for the last decade been two popes within the walls of the Vatican. When the funeral of Benedict takes place tomorrow morning it will, extremely unusually, be presided over by a reigning Pope.

Pope Benedict did in fact preside over the Requiem Mass for his predecessor Pope John Paul II, though he did so in his capacity of the Dean of the College of Cardinals. Josef Ratzinger was subsequently elected in the fastest election in over a century, less than twenty-four hours. Today I went to St Peter’s Basilica on the last day of the lying in state of the Pope Emeritus before tomorrow’s Vatican state funeral.

Crowds were present but on an entirely different scale to the lying in state of John Paul II in 2005 when a proliferation of cars with Polish number plates appeared overnight, tents popped up in every park, and the average wait was fourteen hours. On that occasion, on a hot day in April, I dutifully accompanied my mother-in-law for three or so hours of queuing before she decided she’d made her pilgrimage and we bowed out of the serpentine queue which snaked its way through the Borgo. Today I was in and out in under an hour. Here are some photographs I took (curiously there were no restrictions).