Pope Francis is being honoured at San Lorenzo de Almagro, the Buenos Aires football club where he remained a member during his 12-year papacy.
Fans from the first-tier Primera División club started gathering from Monday at the club’s chapel to the southwest of the Argentinian capital to bid farewell to their best-known member.
“The pope leaves an unbreakable legacy,” San Lorenzo Club President Marcelo Moretti told Reuters. “For all San Lorenzo fans, he was a source of great pride. It is a very sad day.”
At the chapel fans lit candles near a statue of Francis adorned with the team’s red and navy blue colours.
San Lorenzo fans took to social media on news of the pope’s death to point out that his club membership number – 88235N-0 – coincided exactly with his age and the time of death.
“He died at 88 years old, at 2:35am (in Buenos Aires) and was member 88235. It really caught my attention,” wrote one San Lorenzo fan on X.
The club confirmed the pope’s membership number to Reuters.
It has now been confirmed that Ireland will be represented at the funeral of Pope Francis by President Michael D Higgins and Mrs Sabina Higgins, Taoiseach Micheál Martin TD and Tánaiste Simon Harris TD.
Pope Francis will lie in state in St Peter’s Basilica from Wednesday until Friday the Vatican has confirmed.
People will be invited to pay their respects from 11am local time to midnight on Wednesday, from 7am to midnight on Thursday, and for 12 hours from 7am on Friday.
The President Michael D Higgins and his wife Sabina have arrived at the papal nunciature in Ashtown Dublin 7 to sign a book of condolences for Pope Francis.
The prospect of Pope Francis visiting Northern Ireland remained “live and open” right up until shortly before his death, a priest who helped organise his historic 2018 visit to the island has said.
Father Tim Bartlett said Irish bishops had extended an “ongoing invitation” to the pontiff to come to the region after an initial proposal to journey north of the border seven years ago was shelved because of time pressures.
He said that “as the time got closer, the Holy Father and those organising the visit realised we can’t just make a short visit to this part of the island, and it wouldn’t fit into that particular event well. (But) the question of him coming back remained very live and very open.”
Abuse survivor Bernadette Fahy said Pope Francis did not know what an industrial or reformatory school was when she met him in 2018, reports Ronan McGreevy.
Ms Fahy was sent to the notorious Goldenbridge orphanage with her three brothers when she was seven, in 1961, and stayed there until she was 18.
She and her siblings were placed there because their father, who was married with another family, walked out on them.
Ms Fahy was one of eight survivors of clerical abuse who met Pope Francis when he visited Ireland in August 2018.
The pope was “totally perplexed” by the concept of industrial schools, she recalled. “He did understand more about mother and baby homes because they exist in Argentina, so he has some sense about that.”
She said the pope was only aware of male-on-male sexual violence. She asked him: “How come you don’t know about this? Why has all of this been kept from you?”
The pope, she believed, was only concerned about abuse perpetrated by diocesan priests and bishops, not abuse carried out by nuns and priests in Orders.
Nevertheless, she told RTÉ Radio 1’s News at One programme that she liked the pope “as a person. He was doing his best, and I think that the Catholic community has lost somebody really good.
“Right up until the last minute he was doing what he said he was going to do with people, and be out among them.”
News of the death of Pope Francis has seen churches in his native Argentina crowded with people paying their respects to the first Latin American pontiff, as president Javier Milei decreed seven days of national mourning.
This outpouring of emotion has been tinged with regret that during his 12-year papacy, Francis never returned home to visit, reports Tom Hennigan. Seven of his trips to 66 countries around the world were to Latin America but the closest he came to Argentina were trips to neighbouring Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia and Chile.
This was in sharp contrast to his two immediate predecessors, Benedict XVI and John Paul II, who returned to their native Germany and Poland respectively early in their pontificates.
For years after his election, Francis spoke of a trip being under consideration. The country’s episcopal synod maintained an open invitation, as did each of the four presidents to hold office during his papacy. But he never made it.
Italy – as is tradition – has confirmed there will be a five-day period of mourning which will continue until Saturday, the day of the funeral of Pope Francis.
Among Pope Francis’s final words was a thank-you to his nurse, who had helped the pope surprise crowds in St Peter’s Square on Easter Sunday with a short tour in his Popemobile for the first time since surviving a five-week bout of double pneumonia.
“Thanks for bringing me to the square,” Francis told Massimiliano Strappetti, who was providing 24-hour care for the pontiff, the Vatican’s official news outlet reported on Tuesday.
About 35,000 Catholic faithful lined the aisles inside St Peter’s Square on Sunday as the pope made his tour, seated in a raised chair in the back of the Popemobile.
There were shouts of “Viva il papa” (long live the pope), and the vehicle stopped occasionally so Francis could bless babies brought forward by papal aides.
The rest of the pope’s final Sunday was spent normally, the Vatican’s outlet reported. He had a “peaceful dinner”, it said. The first signs of a “sudden illness” occurred at 5:30am on Monday.
“A little more than an hour later, making a farewell gesture with his hand to Strappetti ... the pontiff went into a coma,” said the outlet. “He did not suffer, and it all happened very fast.”
The British prime minister Keir Starmer has become the latest world leader to confirm he will attend the funeral of Pope Francis next weekend. Outgoing German chancellor Olaf Scholz will also attend.
In what can only be described as a moment of serendipity that Hollywood executives could scarcely have dreamed of, the critically acclaimed film Conclave – about the election of a pope – is set to land on the Amazon Prime streaming service tomorrow. It is full of drama and intrigue and plot twists – obviously – but it does paint a pretty accurate and engaging picture of how the process to elect a pope unfolds and is likely to be even more popular given the passing of Pope Francis yesterday.
A book set to be published this week contains what are most likely to have been Pope Francis’s last words on the topic of death.
“Death is not the end of everything, but the beginning of something. It is a new beginning ... because eternal life, which those who love already begin to experience on earth, is the beginning of something that will never end,” Francis wrote in the book on old age by Italian cardinal Angelo Scola.
“For this reason, that (death) is a ‘new’ beginning, because we will live something we have never fully lived before: eternity,” he said.
Leo Varadkar has said the papal visit to Ireland in 2018 was “one of the highlights of my time as Taoiseach”.
Speaking to RTÉ Radio 1, the former taoiseach noted that the visit happened at a time when “relations between the church and state weren’t very good for a number of reasons”.
“There was obviously all the different scandals around child abuse and various institutions, mother and baby homes, laundries, industrial schools,” Mr Varadkar said.
He added that he saw the visit as “a reset” in relations.
“I saw it, and I think the Pope, Pope Francis, saw it as well as an opportunity, maybe, for a bit of a reset.”
Mr Varadkar said it was a chance for the church and state to “shake hands again” and agree to have “mutually respectful” relationship, while acknowledging that the Catholic Church “wasn’t in charge of that relationship anymore, in the way it was for most of our history”.
The former Fine Gael leader, Ireland’s first openly gay taoiseach, said he appreciated efforts by Francis to make the church a more welcoming place for members of the LGBT+ community.
He also said it was “very significant” that Pope Francis asked survivors of clerical abuse for forgiveness while in Dublin in 2018.
When asked about the fact that most religious orders have not offered to contribute to the redress scheme for survivors of mother and baby institutions, Mr Varadkar said this was “disappointing”.
Alphonsus Cullinan, Bishop of Waterford and Lismore, has said Pope Francis “helped the world to remember the poor and to ...
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