The New Yorker:

Paul Elie
Reporting from Vatican City

I watched the funeral for Pope Francis from atop the braccio, or “arm,” extending up and outward to the left of St. Peter’s Basilica. Seated among some of the many photographers and their gear, on a bench that runs behind a balustrade, I shared my view with the stone statues perched on the balustrade—figures who have witnessed plenty of pomp and circumstance throughout the centuries.

To see the ceremony from this height was to see how little the Vatican changes. A large candlestick wheeled into place, rows of red seats accented with gold, cardinals filing in like pupils at a school assembly—it was as if nothing had been altered since I watched the funeral for Pope John Paul II from a high place on the other side of the basilica, twenty years ago. Francis’s service reflected a few changes that he had requested: a plainer wooden coffin than what was typical for most recent Popes, and entombment not in St. Peter’s but in another Roman basilica, St. Mary Major. But on the whole—clerics dressed in red and white and world leaders in black, the coffin borne out of the basilica in a gravid procession, the mingled sounds of tolling bells and helicopter rotors—the proceedings were very familiar.

Go to link