how to watch, who will be there : NPR

Pope Francis will be laid to rest on Saturday as scores of world leaders, church officials and mourners look on.

Francis’ funeral comes six days after Francis died of a stroke and heart failure at age 88, and after tens of thousands of people paid their respects as he lay in state at St. Peter’s Basilica.

After a Saturday morning funeral mass at St. Peter’s, the pope’s coffin will be taken to Rome and entombed at the Basilica of St. Mary Major — making him the first pope to be buried outside of the Vatican in over a century.

It’s not the only way Francis’ funeral is breaking with tradition: He used his authority to simplify burial rites for future popes and left specific instructions to pare down his own.

Here’s what to know about the day, and how to see for yourself.

When and where is the funeral? 

Saturday’s funeral mass will begin at 10 a.m. local time — 4 a.m. ET and 3 a.m. CT.

It will be held in St. Peter’s Square, a large plaza directly in front of St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City.

After the mass, the Vatican says, the pope’s body “will be taken into St. Peter’s Basilica and then to the Basilica of St. Mary Major where he will be buried.”

Why is the burial in Rome? 

Visitors queue on Friday to enter the Basilica of Saint Mary Major in Rome, where Pope Francis will be buried after his funeral.

Piero Cruciatti/AFP via Getty Images

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Piero Cruciatti/AFP via Getty Images

Many popes are buried in the Vatican Grottoes beneath St. Peter’s Basilica. But Pope Francis chose to be buried in Rome, at the Basilica of St. Mary Major — about 2.5 miles away.

Francis chose St. Mary Major because he prayed there before and after each trip out of Rome, and in tough times like the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I’ve always had a great devotion to St. Mary Major, even before I became pope,” he said in a 2024 interview that was turned into a book, El Sucesor.

The last pope buried outside the Vatican was Leo XIII, who died in 1903.

How can I watch? 

Viewers can watch a livestream of the ceremony on the Vatican News’s YouTube channel. The Vatican says it will provide live coverage of the funeral and procession to St. Mary Majors, but will stop before the burial in the Basilica.

Many major broadcasters in the U.S. and around the world will also be covering and streaming the funeral live, including NBC and Peacock, CBS and Paramount+ and ABC News, Disney+ and Hulu.

For the latest, go to NPR.org and the NPR app.

Who will be there?

A view of of St. Peter’s square in Vatican City on Friday, the day before the pope’s funeral.

Antonio Masiello/Getty Images

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Antonio Masiello/Getty Images

The Vatican says the mass will be presided over by Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re — the dean of the College of Cardinals, which will meet in the coming weeks to select the next pope.

He will be joined by “Patriarchs, Cardinals, Archbishops, Bishops, priests, consecrated religious, and lay faithful from around the world.”

The Italian government expects as many as 200,000 people to attend, including over 100 foreign delegations, as NPR has reported.

President Trump has confirmed his attendance, making this the first foreign trip of his second term.

Other world leaders who plan to be there include: United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres; European Union Commission President Ursula von der Leyen; Javier Milei, president of Francis’ native Argentina; Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy; Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, French President Emmanuel Macron; Michael D Higgins and Micheál Martin, the president and taoiseach of Ireland; Polish president Andrzej Duda; Germany’s outgoing Chancellor Olaf Scholz; Spain’s King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Prince William (on behalf of King Charles III).

The Kremlin says Russian President Vladimir Putin will not be at the funeral, according to Russian media reports. Putin is under an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court in connection with alleged war crimes in Ukraine.

What do we know about the proceedings? 

Francis’ coffin will be sealed in a ceremony on Friday night, marking the end of the public viewing period.

On Saturday morning the funeral will begin with a procession, led by a priest carrying a cross, the New York Times reports. After the coffin has been set down in the square, a book of the Gospels will be placed on top of it.

The service will largely be a conventional Catholic funeral, explains NPR religion correspondent Jason DeRose. And while it will predominantly be in Latin, the program lists prayers in other languages — Portuguese, Polish, Chinese, Arabic — nodding to the global nature of the church.

NBC News reports that the Swiss Guards — who have protected the pope and Apostolic Palace for centuries — will kneel for the consecration of the host. There will be a sermon that discusses the life of the pope, though it won’t technically be a eulogy.

The Vatican says that because Pope Francis cared for the poor, a representative group “of poor and needy” will be on the steps leading to the Basilica of St. Mary Major to pay their last respects before his coffin is buried.

How is Francis breaking with tradition? 

Tens of thousands of people paid their respects as the body of Pope Francis lay in state inside St. Peter’s Basilica for three days.

Massimo Valicchia/NurPhoto via Getty Images

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Massimo Valicchia/NurPhoto via Getty Images

The last funeral ceremony for a sitting pope — Pope John Paul II in 2005 — was three hours long, and one of the largest gatherings of statesmen in the world. The most recent papal funeral was for Pope Benedict XVI in January 2023, a decade after he resigned from the position.

But Francis’s will look pretty different.

After he presided over his predecessor’s funeral, the pope worked with the Vatican’s master of liturgical ceremonies to simplify the funeral rites for future pontiffs. Francis wrote in his 2024 autobiography that a pope should be buried “with dignity, but like any Christian, because the bishop of Rome is a pastor and a disciple, not a powerful man of this world.”

One notable change is that the pope’s body no longer needs to be placed in three coffins made of cypress, lead and oak — instead, Francis’ body was placed in a simple wooden coffin with a zinc coffin inside. While lying in state, the coffin was placed not on an elevated bier, but facing the pews.

In his will, Francis asked for his tomb to be “in the ground; simple, without particular decoration, and with the sole inscription: Franciscus,” Latin for Francis. The Vatican says the tomb was made with marble from the Liguria region of Italy, the land of Francis’s grandparents.

What happens next? 

The Vatican says the faithful may begin to visit Francis’s tomb on Sunday, the morning after the funeral.

Francis’ funeral marks the beginning of a nine-day period of mourning called the Novemdiales, with special masses each day.

Soon, Roman Catholic cardinals will convene to elect a new pope. The conclave must begin 15 to 20 days after the death of the pope, which would put its start date sometime between May 6 and May 11.