Portugal marks Pope’s death with three days of national mourning from tomorrow
The highest figures in the Portuguese state will be joining world leaders in Rome on Saturday for the funeral of ‘the people’s pope’, who died very suddenly on Monday morning.
President of the Republic Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, caretaker prime minister Luís Montenegro and parliamentary speaker José Pedro Aguiar-Branco will be among thousands of mourners and world leaders in a delegation that also includes minister of state and foreign affairs Paulo Rangel.
By coincidence, the funeral of Pope Francis follows Portugal’s ‘Liberty Day’ celebrations on Friday April 25. Tomorrow, a meeting of the Council of Ministers will finalise the plan to declare three days of national mourning, which means the ‘celebrations’ will actually go ahead during those days.
After the funeral, the ‘conclave of cardinals’ will set about choosing Pope Francis’ successor. Portugal has four cardinals who will join this select group. There are in fact 250 cardinals in total in the Catholic Church, but those over the age of 80 are not eligible. That leaves 135 who are. According to some sources, in the 12 years of Pope Francis’ tenure, he appointed about 110 of the cardinals who today are eligible, “casting his net wide across the globe“. Some Vatican observers suggest he stacked the conclave in favour of a successor likely to embrace his outlook and continue his work.
This position has been reinforced by Portugal’s cardinal António Marto, who has told journalists this week that “there is no place for regression in the Catholic Church”. The new Pope will have to have “a young mind”.
“‘There are things we can no longer go back on, we can’t go backwards,’ he said, referring to a present in which the world faces “new conditions, new challenges, which require new responses, new paths, new methods, new languages”.
For Marto, the Pope started processes that now need to be continued.
“I think that most of the cardinals will be convinced that it will have to be a candidate who continues these processes initiated by Pope Francis,” he considers.
According to Portuguese news sources, this country’s cardinal Tolentino Mendonça is among the list of “favourites” for the next papacy, but elsewhere the understanding is much more that this could be the ‘first time’ that the Catholic Church gets a pope from the Far East/ Oceania.
Source material: Lusa/ Guardian/ Correio da Manhã
