More than 135,000 Catholics flock to the Vatican while Benedict XVI is located in the Vatican State | Pope Benedict XVI

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More than 135,000 people have already flocked to the Vatican, the day before the funeral of former Pope Benedict XVI on Thursday – a ceremony unprecedented in the modern history of the Catholic Church given that Pope Francis will bury him.

Benedict died on Saturday at the age of 95, nearly a decade after he became the first pope in 600 years to resign.

The number of Catholics who paid tribute in St. Peter’s Basilica, where his body lay in state for three days before the funeral, exceeded the expectations of Rome officials.

During his weekly meeting on Wednesday, Francis paid tribute to his predecessor, a conservative thinker, as “a great catechist.”

Among those paying their respects at St. Peter’s Basilica were hardline conservative leaders, including Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his Polish counterpart, Mateusz Morawiecki.

“There was a lot,” said Marco Tosatti, a journalist from the Vatican. “He had a great influence and was loved by many people, as much as the newspapers hated him.”

Benedict led the Catholic Church for eight years before resigning in 2013, citing failing health. He chose to be called Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI after his abdication, rather than revert to Joseph Ratzinger, continuing to the Vatican and wearing a white robe.

He will be held at a funeral similar to that of the reigning Pope and will be buried in the tomb where Pope John Paul II was buried before his beatification.

Benedict will be buried with coins and medals minted during his time as pope, a pallium he wore as part of his robe and a metal cylinder containing a rogito – a text describing his pontificate.

Only two countries – Benedict’s native Italy and Germany – send official delegations to the funeral.

Despite being in the background over the past decade, Benedict has advanced on a variety of issues, often clashing with Francis’ more liberal views.

In one of his most controversial articles, published in 2019, Benedict blamed the church’s sexual abuse scandals on the sexual revolution of the 1960s and “gay groups” among priests. His opinion came two months after an unprecedented Vatican summit on tackling clerical sexual abuse, and contrasted sharply with that of Pope Francis, who blamed the scandals on a clerical culture that elevated priests above the laity.

The results of a German investigation published last January that Benedict failed to take action against four priests accused of sexual abuse of children during his tenure as Archbishop of Munich.

The number of other Catholics in Rome is expected to reach 70,000 on Thursday.

Iacopo Scaramozzi, Vatican journalist for La Repubblica, said: “Seventy thousand is a lot but it’s nothing compared to the numbers that came in for John Paul II – for him it was 600,000 a day. Benedict was not a very popular man, in fact he was unpopular.” Deliberately…a conservative intellectual who went against the mainstream and hated the crowds.Some want him to become a saint right away, but he wasn’t like John Paul II.

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