Transgender People Are Part of Pope Francis’ Funeral Rites Today

Pope Francis’ coffin is accompanied by papal ushers and the Vatican’s Swiss guard earlier this week.

A group of transgender people are among the roughly 40 individuals selected to form an honor guard on the steps of St. Peter’s Basilica to offer the final farewell to Pope Francis at the conclusion of his funeral Mass today, Vatican News reported.

The news report explained why transgender people were included in this special group:

“For them, the “last” of society, this time it will be a privilege to be the last. The last to say goodbye to Francis before the burial of the coffin that will take place between the Cappella Paolina (the Chapel of the Salus Populi Romani icon) and the Cappella Sforza of the Liberian Basilica, as the Pontiff wished, after the funeral in St. Peter’s Square.”

Other details of this liturgical gesture were also explained:

“Everyone will have a white rose in their hand. There will be about forty of them, all arranged on the morning of Saturday, April 26, on the steps of Santa Maria Maggiore. The poor, the homeless, prisoners, transgender people, migrants will say ‘goodbye’, but above all ‘thank you’ to a Pope who for many of them was like a ‘father’.

These details were provided via phone by Bishop Benoni Ambarus, an auxiliary bishop of Rome, who said the idea arose from a conversation between himself and the Vatican master of ceremonies, Msgr. Diego Ravelli. 

In honor of Francis’ dogged and life-defining commitment to the world’s poor and marginalized, the two prelates decided to assemble “a representation of the various categories of vulnerable people, including the homeless, migrants, prisoners or ex-prisoners, poor families.” The idea is that all the pope’s “favorite people accompanied him in his last steps.” 

Francis DeBernardo, Executive Director of New Ways Ministry, commented:

“Pope Francis himself could not have thought up a more fitting tribute to epitomize his ministry, or a more powerful lesson about the kind of outreach the was trying to teach the church to practice.”

DeBernardo added: 

“The fact that openly transgender people will play a major role in a formal Vatican liturgy may very well be the the first miracle of the several needed to canonize Pope Francis a saint–a reality which so many of us already know is true.”

Ambarus said that the transgender people selected are those he knows personally, and “who we follow through a small community of nuns” who minister with them.

“They have very beautiful stories behind them,” Ambarus continued. “One in particular, when we met even before Christmas, had just signed the first real work contract in her life with the help of Caritas Rome [a Catholic charitable organization]. She was all excited.”

Also present will be prisoners from San Rebibbia prison — the Roman prison whose doors Francis opened as Holy Doors for the 2025 Jubilee of Hope. Ambarus was present for that profound gesture, praising Francis for turning a prison “into a Cathedral” for a day. 

The funeral plans are intended to honor Francis’ priorities of course, but also to provide solace for those vulnerable people he’s left behind, and to remind the church and the world not to forget his “favorite children,” Ambarus said. He continued: 

“There remains for them, for the people who live this prison reality, a great sense of orphanhood, because this is what I hear, this is what they write to me, this is what they tell me. They feel orphaned of a father, on the one hand; on the other, they wrote to me just the other day: ‘We will remain attached to that hope to which he invited us to cling’. And this hope is also that ‘civil society and all of us do not forget them, as Pope Francis often invited us to do.’”

–Jeromiah Taylor, New Ways Ministry, April 26, 2025