Global News Podcast - Plans outlined for Pope’s funeral

Episode Date: April 22, 2025

The Vatican has confirmed details of Pope Francis’s funeral. It’ll take place in St Peter’s Square, on Saturday. Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky are among dozens of world leaders who’ve said that they’ll attend.

This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Bernadette Keogh and at 13h GMT on 22 April these are our main stories. Pope Francis' funeral will be held on Saturday in front of St Peter's Basilica. We'll hear from our correspondent who's with the crowds there. The World Food Programme says it's cutting assistance to nearly 4 million Ethiopians. And the IMF gives its verdict on the likely impact of Donald Trump's global tariffs. Also in this podcast, we hear views on Pope Francis from around the world and… Mmm, I thought they were fantastic. I love the burst of flavour. I would love to have

that kind of thing in space. Astronauts try lab-grown food that scientists hope can be produced in space. Thousands of people are flocking to Vatican City ahead of the lying in state of Pope Francis from tomorrow. The Vatican has published video footage of the late Pope lying in an open casket in the chapel of his residence, Casa Santa Marta. He's dressed in a red robe with the papal mitre on his head and rosary beads in his hands. The 88 year old died on Monday from a stroke and heart failure. Dozens of world leaders will be attending Pope Francis' funeral which will take place on Saturday in the

square in front of St Peter's. We'll hear more about the official ceremonies of mourning in a moment but first the BBC's Sarah Rainsford has been speaking to people who've made the journey to St Peter's Square to honour Pope Francis. I'm looking over towards St Peter's Basilica across the cobblestones of the square here and there are thousands of people gathered here. To remember a Pope who led the Catholic Church for more than 12 years and although he was very sick recently, his death was quite a shock for lots of people here. He was very different, I feel like,

from a lot of other higher-up members of this church. So, very progressive with getting the world to be better about climate change, and I feel like that's maybe rare to see. My name's Emma. And I'm Sarah. Yeah, it's just, he was such a good man. In the world, it's like today we need more like Pope Francis,

it's as simple as that. It was so important that he brought the Catholic religion into the modern day and the fact that he cared about refugees, he cared about people, LGBT community, you know, he cared about people for being people. And he said, didn't he, he wished the church could be poorer. Do you think that his way of leading the church will continue under a new pope? I hope.

We hope so. Dear brothers and sisters, Merry Easter. These few words were the last the Pope would speak in public. They came just after Easter Sunday Mass. So you were here on St Peter's Square when the Pope came for Easter Sunday Mass? Yes, I was here. So I was very close because I was by one of the fences, so I saw him like two metres away. So like I was first row and it was very impressive to see how tired he was and he couldn't you could see

that he couldn't move his arms because he must have been so very tired and so very sick but he was still trying to see people so it was very impressive so it's like he really gave himself to people at the very end and I think that's a great example. himself two people in Tevereira de Allende and I think that's a great example. There's a bit of a huddle in the middle of the square, lots of people gathered around and apparently that's because there's a special edition of a church newspaper, a commemorative one. They're giving out the newspapers for Loservatore, for the Day of the Dead. Observatory. It's a bit of a clamour for these newspapers.

I'm not sure how many copies there actually are. It's a daily newspaper, a political religious daily Catholic newspaper. It says the Lord has called the Pope to him. The crowd just breaking out in applause at the end of those prayers for the Pope. A spontaneous show of affection for a man who will be very much missed by those gathered here today and by millions and millions of Catholics all over the world. The BBC's Mark Lowen, who's also in Rome, told me more about the plans for the Pope's funeral as well as his own recollections of travelling with Francis over the years.

Well, it all kicks off tomorrow, Wednesday, when the coffin of Pope Francis, open casket which is currently in the chapel in the residence Santa Martha residence where he lived will be moved to St. Peter's Basilica and it will lie there in state for mourners and the faithful to come and see his body and pay their respects until Saturday morning, when the funeral will happen at 10 a.m. local time. There will be dignitaries, heads of state from across the world. President Trump has already said he will be there with the First Lady Melania. President Macron of France has said he will come. There are reports that President Zelensky of Ukraine is planning to

attend. Pope Francis will then not be buried in the Vatican. He has said that he wants to actually be buried in a quite a simple ceremony on the other side of Rome at the Basilica Santa Maria Maggiore. He would be only the seventh Pope not to be buried at the Vatican and the first one for more than a century and he has said that he wants a very simple burial in the ground simply with his name in Latin, Franciscus. And Mark, what's the atmosphere like where you are today? It's, I would say, solemn.

You know, there are people who had travelled here for Easter and find themselves then at the centre of a story, really. There are large crowds, and the crowds will grow only larger still. Back in 2005, at the death of John Paul II, it was thought there were a million people who came to Rome at that point. We are expecting huge crowds in the coming days because of course Pope Francis was a superstar pope in the eyes of his supporters, a real icon, a real world leader, and he will draw the

faithful from all over the world. You know, he took the papacy, he took the church to the peripheries of the Catholic Church, to Africa, to the Middle East, to Latin America and South Asia on trips. And we're expecting very much people from those kinds of countries to come here and pay their respects. Indeed, Mark, over many years as Rome correspondent, you travelled with Pope Francis. What's your lasting memory of him? I travelled with him on one of his most momentous trips, Bernadette, to Iraq, actually in the middle of the COVID pandemic. It was a dangerous trip for him.

Subsequently, he said that there had been a couple of suicide bomber attempts on his convoy which had been caught early. It was the first time that there had been a papal visit to Iraq. It's got a very small Catholic population there. It was one of the reasons he went there to try to boost them and give give succor to them and he was really received as a kind of rock star in the stadium I remember in Baghdad he was very relaxed with journalists he often sort of free-wheeled he went off on tangents to talk about philosophy talk about books he had read and in many ways I think he was quite an Argentine he was

quite sort of passionate he loved tango he loved you know football and he shot from the hip sometimes. He would he would denounce things like gossip for example, he hated the gossip and backstabbing of the Vatican and he tried to sort of regulate things and to just be kind of a normal human being in many ways even though he was you know the success of St Peter and the Bishop of Rome. Mark Lowen in Rome. Today, the 22nd of April, is World Earth Day, a day that's been marked for the past 55 years

to stress the need to protect the environment. Francis considered environmental destruction to be an offence against God and made the battle against it one of the key themes of his papacy. Danny Aberhard reports. When Jorge Mario Bergoglio chose Francis as his papal name it seemed a perfect fit. No previous Pope had chosen to name themselves after the medieval mendicant friar, Francis of Assisi. But, as well as being a patron saint of the poor, he was also the patron

saint of ecology. Pope Francis wasn't the first pontiff to speak out on environmental issues, but he gave them unprecedented prominence. In 2015, months before a landmark UN climate conference in Paris, he published the papal encyclical Laudato Si, or Praise be to you, whose name drew on a famous canticle by St Francis himself. It made powerful scientific and moral arguments on the need to care for our common home, planet Earth, and of the urgency to fight global warming. The primary cause of such warming, it stressed, was emissions caused by humans.

This undercut climate change deniers. The effects of global warming on people, primarily the poor, and biodiversity were devastating, and the rich world, the Pope argued, bore a disproportionate share of the blame. Later in his papacy, Francis said the world's climate was nearing breaking point, calling for an accelerated transition away from fossil fuels towards renewables. The Pope denounced consumerism, the throwaway culture, and a system of plundering the earth's resources that prioritise short-term gain and private interests. The question he posed, what kind of world do we want to leave our children?

Danny Aberhard, and we'll have more on the reaction to the death of Pope Francis later in the pod. to leave our children. In other news, for months the United Nations World Food Programme has warned that it's running out of money to sustain its life-saving aid work in places of immense deprivation and hunger. And today the agency has announced that it will suspend aid to nearly four million Ethiopians from next month due to a funding shortfall. The BBC's Imogen Folks is in Geneva and attended a WFP news conference this morning. She's been telling me more about what it's been saying about the funding crisis. It gave more details of what you described there in your introduction which is

huge needs but falling funds. We've got a combination in Ethiopia of conflict within the country, ongoing drought, refugees coming from conflicts outside the country from Sudan for example, immensely high levels of hunger, more than 10 million people the World Food Programme estimates. Now it's been focusing on women and children, more than four million suffering serious malnutrition, but now it said because of lack of funding it's basically run out of the commodities, nutritional foods and so on to support them, it will have to halt rations for 650,000 right away, with millions more threatened in in the next over May and June for example.

So why is the WFP so lacking in funds? Well we've heard a lot about the United States funding cuts which have been savage aid agencies here in Geneva would tell you but there are other countries, Germany, the United Kingdom are also reducing their funding and focusing on domestic economic challenges. But for the United States in particular, it has told the World Food Programme that programmes which are life saving and you would think Ethiopia would qualify would be exempt from the cuts. from the cuts but so far we haven't seen the money to back up those exemptions appearing and that is why today you know the World Food Programme is sounding the alarm saying we actually have no money left we have run out of nutritional food we are going to have to stop working. And just how serious is the situation in Ethiopia in terms of hunger and malnutrition?

Well, aid agencies that have worked in regions threatened by or enduring famine will tell you there are particular warning signs and one of them is the level of child wasting. Anything above 15% of children suffering, wasting because of lack of food is regarded as very, very serious an emergency. That is what is being seen in Ethiopia today. These same aid agencies will tell you that if you want to avoid famine, if you want to prevent it, you have to intervene immediately you see those warning signs. That's why the WFP is going out today and talking to us. They say that to save lives and prevent something much worse in Ethiopia,

they actually need more funding, not less. But whether they will get it, given the attitude towards overseas development and humanitarian aid at the moment from many countries is a very, very big question. Image and Folks As we came into the studio to record this edition of the Global News Pod, the International Monetary Fund released its latest World Economic Outlook. It's the first significant global gauge of the effect of President Trump's widespread trade tariffs. And it's, by any measure, not good. The IMF had to completely revise its

forecast for annual growth as soon as the first tariffs were announced and it's now significantly lowered its global growth predictions. Michelle Fleury is the BBC's New York business correspondent. She's been telling Paul Henley what the IMF is predicting. Look at the start of this year you were seeing certainly here in the United States where I am a strong start. Inflation progress had been made, unemployment was down to sort of levels that are considered healthy, the economy was growing, most economists were looking for around two and a half percent growth this year, two to two and a half percent. Now, suddenly, within the last couple of months, we've seen massive

changes to the outlook, not just here in America, but also around the world. And all of this in large part has to do with the ripple effect of Donald Trump's trade war and the impact it's having on global economies. And so because of that, you've got the IMF now saying that they expect global growth to be much weaker. They're saying 1.8% for the US. And that reflects a cut of nearly a percentage point compared to what they were expecting back in January. Interestingly, for China, where you've seen sort of some of the highest import duties imposed,

there they expect the impact on the economy to be six tenths of a percent. So most of the damage is being done on the US economy in their view. They highlight so much uncertainty, don't they, the IMF, in this report. What are they talking about in terms of uncertainty to do with whether reciprocal tariffs are brought in by individual countries? Well, so we've already seen the initial tariffs that were introduced on April 2nd on sort of what Trump did, Liberation Day, and then there was that 90-day pause to kind of give countries time to try and negotiate their way out of it, if you like. So we're still waiting to kind of see how the dust settles.

But when it comes to trade between China and the US, there you have seen a sharp escalation in tariffs and no pause there. And that will already have an impact. And what they're worried about is if you start to see countries react in kind, then you get this kind of escalating tit for tat cycle and that could cause considerable damage to the economy. Now it's worth pointing out they are not forecasting

a recession, there are others who say actually that is what they are expecting now. The IMF is not going that far today. Michelle Fleury in New York. Still to come, two former prosecutors in Thailand have been found guilty of helping the heir to the Red Bull energy drink empire avoid standing trial in a fatal hit-and-run case. More now on the death of Pope Francis. As preparations take shape for his funeral on Saturday and the conclave that will, in due course, elect his successor, communities around the world continue to digest the significance of his passing.

In July 2013, Pope Francis made his first ever papal trip. He chose the tiny Italian island of Lampedusa, at a time when it was struggling to cope with thousands of migrants who'd crossed the Mediterranean Sea. On arriving at the island, a dot of land just over 100 kilometres from the coast of Tunisia, the new pope threw a wreath into the sea to commemorate the thousands of people who'd died trying to reach Europe. It was a visit that in some ways set the tone for his papacy and in particular his commitment to the plight of migrants. The mayor of Lampedusa at the time was Giuseppina Nicolini. It was extraordinarily important because it was his first trip. Yes, I remember that sermon that Pope Francis delivered here.

It was a very harsh condemnation of what he called indifference, the globalization of indifference. But it was also a very strong indictment of the political and economic powers that he blamed as being responsible. And it was important to make the world understand that the dead at sea are not victims of the sea, but victims of policies of expulsion and border closures. Giuseppina Niccolini, and you can hear her full interview on the Newsday programme on Wednesday morning. As thoughts begin to turn to the future and to Francis' replacement as Pope, more consideration

will be given over time to his legacy. He was without doubt a transformative Pope and not just in the way he oversaw the shift in the Catholic Church's centre of gravity from the old world to the new, the developing countries of Latin America, Asia and Africa. His simplicity and his determination to address the power of the Vatican bureaucracy, the Curia, marked him out from his predecessors. But there's no avoiding the fact that he was at times, for some within the Church, especially more conservative Catholics, a divisive figure. Kelsey Reinhart is the head of media and evangelization at CatholicVote.org, a non-profit organization in the U.S. founded in 2008 to advocate conservative family values within the Catholic Church.

Mary Flaherty I think that his legacy will certainly be complex. The closeness that people felt with him varied based upon whether or not they were a part of the peripheries that he loved and embraced, or whether or not they were a part of the peripheries that he loved and embraced, or whether or not they felt a little bit abandoned by what they perceived as ambiguity within his leadership. I think that we have to acknowledge here at this moment that this was the first pope in the new digital age, a time of TikTok and Instagram, a pope where every single comment that he made off the cuff could be echoing across the globe to millions of people in social media and sometimes manipulated by ideologues. Sometimes it was just his own ambiguity in speaking or his

informal style of communication that left a trail of confusion. I think that there certainly was an ability for his words to be taken and ran with by segments of the population, and that was magnified by what's possible with social media. But I definitely think that there was a continuity across the teachings of the church that he kept to and held to. What would you like to see, what characteristics would you like to see in his successor? Clarity and confidence in the proclamation of the gospel. These are really confusing times to live in. I think in the United States in particular, there are questions of identity, but also of despair. I think we've seen a growth in loneliness since the COVID

pandemic, and people are asking what ultimately leads them to happiness, what ultimately is the meaning of life. And so that's the question that resonates in every heart, and that's the question that Jesus Christ is the answer to. So certainly a clarity and confidence in the proclamation of that gospel, but then also, I would say, a defender of the importance of the confidence in the proclamation of that gospel, but then also, I would say, a defender of the importance of the faith in the public square. KLC Reinhart, who was talking to Victoria Uwankunda. One of the issues that irked those more conservative forces within the Catholic Church was Pope Francis's at times more generous attitude towards homosexuality and same-sex unions,

though this too was anything but straightforward. In late 2023, for example, Francis allowed priests to bless same-sex couples, a significant advance for LGBT people within the Church. At the same time though, the Vatican insisted that such blessings should not be part of regular church rituals, all related to civil unions or weddings, and that the church continued to view marriage as between a man and a woman. The day after that announcement, one Catholic priest in New York, Father James Martin, blessed the union between Jason Steidl and Damian Jack. They've been talking to Rob Young, who began by asking Jason how he felt when the Vatican announced it would allow

the blessing of same-sex marriages. I'll be honest, initially I wasn't super impressed. We had been married in a Protestant church, we couldn't get married in the Catholic church, and we felt that already our marriage was blessed, whether the Vatican recognized it or not. At first I was sort of like, well, the Pope has a lot of guff to think that he can offer a blessing for our marriage when we're already perfectly content the way we are.

But Damien, you were then persuaded otherwise. I mean, I think I had the same feeling, you know, that we're already blessed, you know, we're already married and, you know, we didn't have anything to prove. But I did see the significance of what the Pope did and I thought it was a beautiful gesture because so many other people can actually see this and it really opens up a lot of doors and a lot of like avenues that have been closed to LGBTQ persons for so long. So I saw it as an opportunity. And so Jason, just tell us about the blessing. Where did it take place and who did it? We were invited to the Jesuit residence in Manhattan. Father James Martin, a personal friend, offered to bless us together and we received Father Martin's short blessing.

And that sounds Damien, quite last minute, quite low key, but then it becomes a national moment in America. Yeah, yeah. It was really surprising. It really kind of blew up. We ended up on the front page of the New York Times, and it became a huge symbol, I think, of Pope Francis's papacy and his broader relationship to the

LGBTQ community. And so, Damien, you both said initially that you didn't really see the need for this to happen, but did you want the Pope to go further than merely allowing a simple blessing? That's a lot of questions. I think I always want more, but I also see the significance of where it did start because things have to start somewhere, right? The way that the church views LGBTQ persons isn't going to change overnight. So aside from what I would prefer, which would be for us to go all all the way where LGBTQ folks can be married in the church and that recognition, I know that this is a bridge towards that. So I definitely

respect and understand that as part of the journey. Damien Steidljak and before that Jason Steidljak, they were speaking to Rob Young. Two former prosecutors in Thailand have been found guilty of helping the heir to the Red Bull energy drink empire avoid standing trial in a fatal hit-and-run case. Celia Hatton reports. In a killing that dates back to 2012, Wuryut Yuitia is accused of driving at high speed in his black Ferrari while drunk and slamming into a policeman, dragging his body for 100 meters. The heir to the Red Bull drink fortune now lives in

exile and has ignored summons to return. But the case lives on. A Bangkok court found the prosecutors, one of them a former deputy attorney general, had minimised the charges against Warayut Yewetia, in part by altering the speed at which his car had been driving. Mr Warayut has been spotted at luxury events around the world in recent years, stoking anger in Thailand where many believe wealthy people can avoid justice. Celia Hatton. Astronauts don't go to space for the food. In fact, it's pretty terrible up there.

But could a new experiment launching into orbit today be a giant leap for galactic grub? The European Space Agency hopes so, which is why it's sending a mission to test the viability of lab-grown food in the low-gravity and environment. It'll include everything from steak to mashed potatoes and dessert. Our science correspondent, Palabgosh, reports. Up and on its way into orbit. On board a small scientific experiment

to see if astronauts can grow food for themselves in test tubes. Bubbling away is genetically modified yeast. It's producing proteins that's dried into a powder which can be turned into all sorts of food. Right now, eating in space isn't a gourmet experience. Although the astronauts are enjoying themselves, the food itself isn't much fun. A lot of it is freeze-dried, they have the same things most days and it's really pricey. It costs around £20,000 to feed one astronaut for one day

and those costs are only going to spiral if NASA achieves its aim of having tens and eventually hundreds of astronauts living and working in space. So lab-grown food like this could be a cheaper and believe it or not tastier alternative. Helen Sharman was Britain's first astronaut when she went to the Soviet Union's Mir space station in 1991. What does she think of what could be the food of the future? I thought they were fantastic. I love the burst of flavour. I don't think I've ever really tasted anything exactly like that, but I would love to have that kind of thing in space. Is it important to get the food right for astronauts in space?

One of the biggest problems actually is that food is just boring in space and so astronauts tend to often lose body mass, we'd say lose weight on Earth, just because they're not eating so much because they've not got that variety and that interest. The experiment will be in Earth's orbit for just a few hours. It'll be the first of several experiments in space to help develop the technology. If all goes well, astronauts on the International Space Station could be trying out some lab-grown food in just a few years' time. Palab gosh. And that's all from us for now, but there'll be a new edition of the Global News Podcast

later. There's going to be a special edition of the Global News Podcast taking your questions about what happens next and how the next hope is chosen. Send us a voice note to the usual email address globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk. If you want to comment on this podcast or the topics covered in it, you can send us an email too to the same address. You can also find us on X at BBC World Service. Use the hashtag globalnewspod. This edition was mixed by Jack Wolfen and the producer was Mark Duff. The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Bernadette Keough. Until next time, goodbye.