More than 150,000 people from all over the world have viewed Pope Francis’s body as the Vatican makes the final preparations for his funeral on Saturday, an event that will be attended by 50 heads of state and 10 monarchs.

St Peter’s Basilica closed at 2.30am on Friday and reopened three hours later to accommodate the last of the huge crowds of mourners who had waited patiently to pay their respects to Francis, who died at the age of 88 on Monday after a stroke. The basilica is scheduled to close at 7pm and the pope’s coffin will be sealed at 8pm in a private ceremony attended by senior cardinals.

Many of the funeral guests, including the US president, Donald Trump, and his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, will arrive in Rome on Friday. Trump and his wife, Melania, are due to arrive on Air Force One at Fiumicino airport at 10.50pm local time.

Joe Biden will also attend, a spokesperson for the former US president said on Friday. Biden met Francis on the sidelines of the G7 summit in Italy last June.

At least 130 foreign delegations will be heading to the Italian capital, including Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and the Prince of Wales.

Seated in the front row at the funeral will be leaders from Francis’s home country of Argentina, with Italian leaders in the second row, and other heads of state and royals in the third.

After four days of silence, the Israeli prime minister offered his condolences to the pontiff, who had repeatedly condemned the war in Gaza.

“The State of Israel expresses its deepest condolences to the Catholic church and the Catholic community worldwide at the passing of Pope Francis,” Benjamin Netanyahu wrote on X. “May he rest in peace.”

Israel is not sending a senior official to the funeral, although its ambassador in Rome will attend.

The funeral requires a huge and complex security operation in the Vatican and Rome involving thousands of Italian police and military, as well the Vatican’s Swiss Guards, the smallest army in the world. Soldiers in St Peter’s Square have been equipped with guns that shoot down drones, while rooftop snipers and fighter jets are on standby.

Cardinal Kevin Farrell, the camerlengo running the Vatican’s day-to-day affairs until a new pope is elected, will preside over the so-called rite of the sealing of the coffin on Friday evening.

Francis’s funeral mass will begin at 10am in St Peter’s Square on Saturday and is expected to attract 200,000 pilgrims. His simple wooden coffin will then be driven slowly to Santa Maria Maggiore Basilica, about 2.5 miles away in Rome’s Esquilino neighbourhood.

The coffin will leave via the back exit of the basilica for a journey through Rome that is expected to take about 30 minutes.

Francis will be buried in the ground, his undecorated tomb marked with just one word: Franciscus. The burial ceremony will be a private event attended by his relatives. People will be able to visit the tomb from Sunday morning.

The funeral mass will be led by the Italian cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, the dean of the college of cardinals, in what is expected to be a solemn ceremony.

“What surprised me was how determined he was to serve the church and love his people with all his energy, to the very end,” the cardinal said in an interview with La Repubblica published on Friday.

Amid the funeral planning, speculation is rife about who will succeed Francis. Cardinals approved nine days of mourning from the date of the funeral, with a conclave – the secret election process to choose a new pope – therefore not expected to begin before 5 May.

There is no clear frontrunner, although Luis Antonio Tagle, a reformer from the Philippines, and Pietro Parolin, from Italy, are early favourites.

(Source: The Guardian)