The late Pope Francis lies in state this evening in St Peter’s Basilica just across from here. He was carried in a plain wooden casket in a procession of red robed cardinals, bishops, priests and dignitaries.
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But this was to be the people’s day – the faithful, the ordinary men and women who perhaps defined his papacy.
He reached out to them from the very beginning.
In his first address as Pope he rejected the more formal traditional Papal greeting, choosing instead to simply say "brothers and sisters good evening".
Many queued for hours to return what they say was his devotion to them. Among the crowds who had begun gathering first thing this morning, there was love and gratitude but also uncertainty about the future.
What would it bring? Would Pope Francis’s legacy endure and grow or will the church choose a different direction?
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