If you look at Vatican TV live right now, you’ll see a queue of people lining up inside St Peter’s basilica to visit the coffin at the top with the body of Pope Francis. It’s open and you can see the corpse…looking a bit grey, it must be said, but recognisably him. I recall the funerals I attended of his two predecessors. I was in those queues then and I remember the phones being raised as soon as people got into the basilica; before they saw anything of the spectacle, their phone saw it.
Pope Benedict, I’m afraid, looked awful as a corpse…rather dark grey. I said as much to an American Franciscan friar in the basilica who obligingly was taking confessions, and he agreed: “not looking his best”, he thought. We took the view that whoever had laid out the body had done a rubbish job.
For many of those who came to pay their respects (or came out of curiosity), the pope’s body may be the first corpse they have seen. Dead bodies on display in a coffin are regarded nowadays as in rather poor taste, a disagreeable reminder of or mortality for a generation that isn’t at all sure about what comes next. Our lot don’t want a memento mori, that medieval symbol of death to remind us that this life is passing away. At worst they’re seen as ghoulish. But that’s our problem, I say. We often sub-contract death to hospitals rather than have our relations dying at home, so the whole business of death is remote and sanitary. That means we miss out on the end of the cycle of life.
Corpses are, if not us, what remain of our bodily selves after we die
But that’s not wholly true of Catholicism in which corpses are quite often on show. The embalmed bodies of saints are sometimes on show at the base of altars in parts of Italy and can be viewed through a glass front; in other cases, it’s their waxwork effigy. The body of the teenage Londoner, Carlo Acutis, who is to be canonised soon, is on show in a church in Assisi, looking as fresh as a daisy, and it gave some of the English visitors I was with quite a disagreeable turn to see it. One of them took a detour round the church so as to avoid the spectacle.
But why? Corpses are, if not us, what remain of our bodily selves after we die. We are properly respectful around dead bodies, because they represent our physical humanity and by and large it has been one of the distinctive features of humankind that we honour mortal remains. And one day that’s how we too will look.
I have just returned from a funeral in Ireland and yesterday I went to view the body. Nancy was lying in her coffin, like the pope is now, looking her best, clutching a rosary; the woman undertaker had done a lovely job. “I don’t like to overdo the makeup”, she said. I touched Nancy’s hand and forehead and yes, she was cold as death. And it was salutary to see this good woman before the lid closed on her forever.
I had seen my father in his coffin and watched my mother die before she was put in hers. It sounds stupid to say this, but there’s a startling difference between a living body and a dead body and seeing the dead reminds us of that rather basic reality. St Thomas Aquinas said once, “my soul is not me” (viz, we’re a combination of body and soul) and after you’ve seen a corpse you know my body is not me either.
Perhaps take a look at those images of Pope Francis in death. And remember, such as he is, so shall we be.
Melanie McDonagh is a London Standard columnist
