On Wednesday, the lying in state for His Holiness Pope Francis began, with tens of thousands of mourners filing past his open casket in St Peter’s Basilica.
In death before us, Pope Francis is still preaching his last sermon to the faithful; et tu in Arcadia ego. Death is always with us.
When did you last, or ever, see a corpse, never mind an illustrious corpse, a global figure, like Pope Francis? In England at least, it is becoming almost unheard of.
The English don’t do death any longer. Or at least not visibly.
The English Wake, sharing the company of the dead as our Victorian forebearers did, has withered away. The dead mostly now pass unseen and unwatched from hospital bed to crematorium. Almost 25 per cent of all English deaths are now direct cremations – devoid even of the ritual of a funeral.
The dead have allegedly become so distasteful, so obscene to us that legions of TV editors are employed to protect us by pixelating out every intimation of mortality, whilst reporting on war zones filled with dead bodies.
No doubt even now, broadcasting edicts are being hotly written in the BBC, and Ofcom manuals consulted, delimiting the precise close-ups deemed allowable of the Pontifical dead flesh.
But denying ourselves the sight of our dead, or lying to our children about dying, is the ultimate woke mentality – what exactly are we pretending not to be?
The denial diminishes us precisely because it is this existential encounter between the living and dead that is and remains the very epicentre of all human civilisation, spawning our eternal quest for eternal life. It is the source of every religion, holy book, priesthood, temple, mosque, synagogue, God and guru, and the cause of countless other wars against heretics and non-believers who have failed to believe in our version of a deathless heaven. Plus the inspiration, more flippantly, of jars of face cream, gym equipment, vitamin pills, fashion, pension plans and therefore the entire edifice of world capitalism and stock markets. The living determinedly don’t want to be dead. Even Elon Musk can’t as yet write out a cheque to be resurrected like Lazurus.
Except death, of course, confounds us.
In the Catholic faith, the centrality of the belief in Christ’s resurrection, is underpinned by endless depictions of the Pietà – the image of a very dead, bloodless, grey Jesus in his mother’s arms. It is this Christ’s mortal body that has escaped death and rose again.
In Communism, the embalmed bodies of Mao, Lenin and Ho Chi Minh are openly displayed to public view in mausoleums, as if to underpin the deathless nature of the regime and its god-like founders.
Other cultures, like the Irish Wake, are far less anxious about sharing the company and sight of the dead and it would not be uncommon for an ordinary Irish citizen to view hundreds of dead bodies of strangers at wakes and funeral parlours over a lifetime.
In his global fame, by sharing his dead body with the world, His Holiness, and the Roman Curia, are promulgating a far more ancient but universal truth that confounds our childish woke denial of our mortal nature: death truly is always with us, even the great.
It is this strident lack of shame of the sight of his dead flesh, his hands and face in his open coffin, which makes the death of the Roman Catholic Pontiff so unique, so revelatory. A blessing.
Not everyone will share in the Pope’s Catholic religious belief, but we all share, great or not, in our common mortality. Francis’s funeral obsequies, open and unashamed, are a reminder of the power and revelation of accepting rather than denying ourselves the company of the dead.
Kevin Toolis is the writer of My Father’s Wake: How the Irish Teach Us to Live, Love and Die.
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