APRIL 26, 2025
The pope’s funeral. – Salwan Georges/The Washington Post
For several years when I was a boy, I was the organist at a small Catholic church where I played two and sometimes three Masses a week. The architecture was modern, post-Vatican II, with the organ set to the side of the altar. From there, you could see both the priest and the parishioners, and thus the fundamental tension in Catholicism between order and imperfection. The basic elements of the ritual were unchanging, but it never came off the same way twice. Hands trembled, voices quavered, the lector stumbled over words and sometimes the organist, lost in thought, missed a cue.
The funeral Mass for Pope Francis, attended by some quarter-million people and watched on screens by many millions more, showed this same tension on a geopolitical scale. Cameras scanned the vast geometry of St. Peter’s Square and its massive basilica, capturing the orderly opposition of secular and sacred power in the rows of dignitaries near the simple wooden coffin, as well as the grand, disorderly sea of people enclosed within the arms of Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s giant colonnade.
This was a spectacular event that wasn’t a spectacle, but ritual as I remembered it from decades ago. The choir sang with precision and grace, but individuals chanted with sometimes tremulous or parched voices. The readings were polished, but none had the practiced inflection and engaging cadences we have come to expect from people who speak professionally for a living: actors, news anchors, politicians. The outdoor setting, under azure skies and a brilliant sun, meant that even some of the most sumptuously attired clergy wore a motley display of sunglasses.
It was a striking contrast with genuine spectacle — displays of power and hierarchy that are performed rather than enacted. Presidential inaugurations, coronations and royal weddings and funerals are just as choreographed, but there is no balance between order and imperfection. The latter is banished to space outside the ceremony, where people may line the streets, but not intrude upon the performance. They are spectators, never participants. Secular pageantry wants both order and perfection. Any flaw is a potential weakness, in the spectacle if not the state itself.
There are few institutions in the free world more hierarchical and less democratic than the Catholic Church, yet imperfection thrived on Saturday morning as Francis was celebrated for having stood squarely on the side of the flawed and the marginal. The cameras captured the scale of the crowd and grandeur of the architecture, but mainly focused on the service itself. If this funeral had been staged for an American audience, those cameras would have picked out the famous and powerful, lingered on the familiar and beautiful, and punctuated it all with mawkish visual poetry. There was refreshingly little of that.
The coffin of Francis is carried after a funeral Mass at St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City, on Saturday. – Salwan Georges/The Washington Post
And so, it was easy to miss how the setting itself reflects the same fundamental tension. The great baroque architect Bernini designed the square in the 17th century so perfectly that visitors are barely aware of the myriad problems he was solving. There was a preexisting fountain in what became the giant oval enclosed by the colonnade, and a giant obelisk that had been pillaged from Egypt by the Romans in ancient times. Both had to be incorporated into the design.
The front of St. Peter’s was also encroached upon by the Vatican Palace, which meant that the square just in front of the basilica has the bent sides of a trapezoid. The architect’s solution for this “square” wasn’t a square at all, but a keyhole-shaped plaza that almost miraculously makes the colossal facade of the basilica feel closer than it is.
The casket of Pope Francis is seen in front of clergy members. – Salwan Georges/The Washington Post
All of this is an overlay on an ancient site that was once a circus, a giant, oblong space used for chariot races, among other events. Sigmund Freud once used an image of the Eternal City to help explain the human unconscious, inviting readers to imagine a Rome in which “nothing once constructed had perished, and all the earlier stages of development had survived alongside the latest.” Past is present, old is new, all things coexist in simultaneous perpetuity, and it takes merely a shift in perspective to see new aspects of this totality — a bit like the optical illusions built into Bernini’s plaza.
Bernini imposed order on a site cluttered with history and violence, but it was an imperfect order of theatrical contrivance, not the Platonic perfection of ideal forms. The theater and spectacle of the architect’s creation hardly registered during the funeral for Francis because a Mass isn’t theater. The setting was superseded by the ritual, the ritual was intensely ordinary and familiar, and when we saw individual faces among the crowd, they showed traces of engagement and distraction that were exactly the same as one might find any Sunday at any church around the world.
The opposite of order isn’t actually imperfection; it is disorder or chaos. For many, including many traditionalist leaders within the Catholic Church, religion is a bulwark against a threatening sense of chaos. Order is the ideal, equated with absolutes like perfection and truth. As the conclave to select the next pope begins, no one knows if that will be someone who, like Francis, stands for a dynamic balance between order and imperfection, or reverts to a more rigorously ritualistic opposition of order and chaos.
That uncertainty was captured in one of the most striking shots of the morning, when Francis’s coffin was borne back into St. Peter’s for the last time, before his interment in the ancient basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore. For a moment, the screen showed a view from directly overhead, capturing the coffin as it passed through the monumental entrance designed by Carlo Maderno.
From that perspective, the coffin felt like a tiny thing subsumed into something vastly greater than human scale. The body of a man was entering the body of a church, and the image suggested a conflict of metaphors, both a seed into soil or the moment of capture by some great fish.
Courtesy/Source: Washington Post
