Last week, the nave of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome was filled with transparent acrylic chairs, tightly packed, neatly lined up in rows to accommodate the crowd that attended Pope Francis’s funeral. Outdoors, in St. Peter’s Square, hundreds of identical chairs also filled up an enormous amount of space, shimmering like translucent headstones. Each of those ghostly plastic chairs, whether huddled under Michelangelo’s dome or hemmed in under a blue sky by Bernini’s colonnade, was a memento mori, a reminder of mortality and the brevity of life. So much evanescent seating, so seemingly insubstantial, so ephemeral, all of it set up for a funeral. The scene was at once poignant and unsettling.
Indoors, in the nave of the basilica, statues of notable saints stood guard over the acrylic seats, silently—including the one representing St. Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, Pope Francis’s own religious order.
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