A full house and fitting farewell
Events
Adelaide's faithful arrived in droves to pay their respects at the Memorial Mass for Pope Francis on Sunday.
They arrived at St Francis Xavier’s Cathedral’s Wakefield Street doors from shortly after 10am, in dribs and drabs firstly and then in twos and threes and finally in larger groups shortly before the 11am start.
Everyone was welcomed. There were leaders of other churches in Adelaide, politicians including the deputy state Premier Susan Close who stopped to talk before the television cameras banked up along the pavement by the cathedral entrance. She spoke of Pope Francis as a leader and a person, politics absent.
The church was near to bulging at 10.50am when a black saloon car pulled up by the eastern side of the church. Anyone missing it would have been alerted by the rushing cameramen desperate not to miss out as Frances Adamson AC, the Governor of South Australia, arrived with her husband and entered by the side door. She smiled, a patently very popular addition to the memorial Mass, and headed for the reserved seats near to the altar.
With five minutes to go the likelihood of an unversed seat was nil, St Francis Xavier’s Cathedral was packed, the spaces behind the back pews chock full with TV camera crews and the late arrivals.
The ecclesiastical procession, perhaps as many as 30 participants, passed through and on the stroke of 11, the Mass began.
It was, on the face of it, a conventional Sunday morning service but with space for Archbishop Patrick O’Regan to talk about the Pope, a man he had been lucky enough to meet four times. How long the Mass might last, no-one apart from the Archbishop knew.
The entrance hymn, liturgical greetings and first and second readings done, he began his homily. It focused, in all of its 13 and a half minutes, on Pope Francis and how fortunate we all were to have had him at the helm.
There was a hush as he spoke, the congregation intent on hearing something of Francis the man as much as pontiff, something a little personal that we had not heard before. The Archbishop did not disappoint, it was a soothing and well pitched paean, and very much what the people had come for.
It was close to 12.25pm when the dismissal came. Exiting quickly via the middle door was impossible as the archbishop shook hands with everyone keen to, vicariously, to say hello to the man who had said hello to the Pope, the time in October last year during the Synod on Synodality.
Later, when the crowds had thinned considerably, he stood for photos with parishioners keen to send evidence of the day back to their families across the globe. No one pushed or cajoled for their 20 seconds with the Archbishop.
Media conference done by 1pm, it was quiet once more. It was autumnal overcast and while the sun wouldn’t come out, it didn’t need to. It had already been the brightest of days.
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