Vatican ushers dressed in gray tuxedos slowly pushed the platform,
which was bedecked with red and yellow roses, behind a silent procession
led by solemn-looking cardinals and altar boys wearing fashionable sunglasses.
Inside the glass box, John's body was dressed in a white, silk cassock
and red cape. His big head rested on damask red pillows. His face was covered
with a wax mask.
The coffin stood in the square as Pope John Paul said a mass for tens
of thousands of people.
Pope John will join only two other pontiffs to be placed in glass coffins
inside the church. The others are Saint Pius X and Innocent XI.
A HISTORICAL RARITY
Sunday's ceremony marked one of the rare times in history that a living
pope and the body of a dead pope were in the square at the same time.
In his homily, the Pope said it was a "happy coincidence" that John's
body had returned to the same square where tens of thousands of people
prayed for him on the night of June 3, 1963, as he lay on his deathbed,
his stomach ravaged by cancer.
The body of John, who was beatified and put on the road to sainthood
last year, was exhumed in January and found to be in surprisingly good
condition.
Although some thought it was a miracle, the conservation was in fact
due to the work of Professor Gennaro Goglia, a doctor who secretly embalmed
the dead pope with a special liquid.
Goglia, now 78, said his emotions on seeing the face were mixed.
"It made me think of Madame Tussauds (Wax Museum)," he told Reuters
Television. "It could have been handled better," he said, adding that a
cleansing solution would have given the dead pope a more natural look.
In the past five months since it was exhumed, technicians have been
working to keep the body preserved so that it could remain visible to the
faithful.
Since it was exhumed, the body of John was effectively "mummified,"
as one technician put it. The coffin's glass is bullet-proof and treated
to block ultra-violet rays which could damage the body.
John, known as the "Good Pope" because of his jovial and benevolent
nature, reigned from 1958 to 1963.
BRIEF REIGN, HISTORIC PAPACY
Although his reign was relatively brief, he revolutionized the Roman
Catholic Church by calling the Second Vatican Council, which modernized
the Church.
After Sunday's mass the body was moved into the basilica's main floor,
and, after faithful are allowed to file past it for a day, it will be placed
permanently in a side chapel.
The body had been kept in a marble crypt in the Vatican grottoes under
the basilica along with many of the 147 other popes who are buried inside
Christendom's largest church.
Although Vatican officials are not commenting, there has been widespread
speculation that the current Pontiff some day may be buried in the spot
in the grottoes where John XXIII was.
Nearly four decades after his death, the man born Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli
remains one of history's most loved popes, with a particularly devout following
in Italy.
He has been credited with curing an Italian nun, Caterina Capitani,
of a stomach tumor. She prayed to him and quickly recovered with no apparent
medical explanation. |