Kings and queens, rabbis and ayatollahs, presidents, holy patriarchs and prime ministers will on Friday gather in pomp to bid farewell to a pauper — a man whose will, published on Thursday, shows he left ”no property of which it is necessary to dispose”.
In his last testament, written on March 6 1979, five months after he became Pope, Karol Wojtyla added vaguely: ”As for those things of daily use that I needed, I ask for them to be distributed as seems opportune.”
A codicil to the will also showed the pope had considered resigning in 2000, but dismissed the idea on the grounds that he had been ”miraculously” saved from assassination to complete his papacy. Already sick and crippled, he expressed the wish that God would ”lend me the necessary strength”.
Self-denying spirituality and the trappings of worldly power will stand in uneasy counterpoise on the sagrato, the consecrated forecourt of St Peter’s, when German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger officiates at a funeral Mass attended by leaders as diverse as presidents George Bush and Muhammad Khatami of Iran.
Zimbabwe’s head of state, Robert Mugabe, a former Jesuit seminarian, arrived on Thursday, defying a European Union travel ban imposed because of his regime’s human rights abuses.
Red, set off by the white of St Peter’s travertine, will dominate the service. It is the colour of mourning in the Vatican. Before the mass, in a ceremony conducted by the chamberlain of the Holy Roman Church, Cardinal Eduardo MartÃÂnez Somalo, the pope’s body will be transferred to a coffin. A white silk veil will then be placed across his face before the coffin is sealed.
On Thursday, the corpse was still lying in state in St Peter’s as a surging wave of his fellow Poles broke over Rome: old men with Lech Walesa walrus moustaches, young girls with ivory complexions, Poles of every sort. And, thanks to a gigantic confidence trick, most of them got in to say goodbye to their ”Lolek”.
On Wednesday, the Italian government’s special commissioner, Guido Bertolaso, announced he was closing off the queues leading to St Peter’s at 10pm. He warned that Rome was saturated and services were in danger of collapsing. The effect was to persuade many Italians and others to go, or stay home. Yet, without any announcement, in the middle of the night, the queues were allowed to re-form.
Anyone who turned up on Thursday, as did the Poles, could get in with less waiting than the day before. It was a supremely gracious, if spectacularly crafty, gesture that should cement Italian-Polish relations for half a century.
”I’m delighted. I never expected to get in to see him”, said Silvia Naczmarista, who had left Bydgoszcz by bus on Tuesday night.
Where were they all going to sleep?
”We do not know,” said one, unconcerned.
The queue wound through the cobbled streets of the Borgo, the district by the Vatican. The marshals allowed them down a side street that leads to the Vatican. As they rounded the corner, catching their first, awe-inspiring sight of the basilica, they were hit by a blast of Jesus Christ, You Are My Life, from loudspeakers on either side of the boulevard. There is nothing you can teach the Vatican about stagecraft.
And if getting in to see the dead pope once was good, well, twice was even better. Douglas Darko, an accountant from London, and his wife, Cornelia, arrived on Tuesday.
”We started queuing at one in the afternoon and we didn’t get in until two the following morning,” he said. ”But when we got back to the hotel, I said, ‘We came all this way. We’d better go in again.”’ — Guardian Unlimited Â