Catholic faithful pay their respects to Pope Francis as lying in state begins – as it happened (2025)

… and on that note, it’s a wrap from me, Jakub Krupa, for today.

• Thousands of Catholic faithful lined up to pay their final tributes to Pope Francis, as his coffin was moved to lie in state in St Peter’s Basilica after a ceremony this morning (8:23, 8:49, 9:03, 9:24, 9:28, 9:36).

• The coffin with his body will lie in state until Friday evening, the night before the funeral (10:47, 12:54).

• Our Rome correspondent Angela Giuffrida noted the unexpected decision to keep the coffin open during the procession (10:14), as she described how it was an “emotional experience” to see him for the final time – and spoke about the simplicity of his coffin (13:27).

Elsewhere in Europe,

• Ukraine is ready to negotiate but not to surrender, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister Yuliia Svyrydenko said as details emerged in media reports of a US proposal for a deal which would see Ukraine give up almost all territory currently occupied by Russia (16:29).

• The deal was described by our defence and security editor Dan Sabbagh as “Russia … willing to trade territory it does not control in Ukraine – in effect fresh air – for a US recognition of its 2014 seizure of Crimea, in other words a formal acknowledgment that it is possible to change borders by force, in effect creating an extraordinary precedent” (Ukraine blog).

• Apple and Meta have been fined €500m and €200m respectively for breaching the EU’s flagship digital regulation, the Digital Markets Act (12:02). The bloc’s officials insisted the enforcement decision was not linked to on-going stand-off in relations with the US (12:21).

• EU trade commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis warned that while the EU’s first preference is to reach a negotiated solution with the United States over trade, if discussions with the US do not lead to a solution, the EU will respond with countermeasures (16:27).

• A powerful earthquake with a magnitude of 6.2 hit the Marmara Sea near the western outskirts of Istanbul (12:51), with more than 150 people hospitalised with injuries sustained while fleeing buildings.

• Denmark’s King Frederik will travel to Greenland, a semi-autonomous Danish territory, on 28 April, the Royal House confirmed (16:19).

• Polish foreign minister Radosław Sikorski told Russia “you will never rule here again,” as he presented to parliament the government’s priorities in foreign policy (16:04).

And that’s all from me, Jakub Krupa, for today.

If you have any tips, comments or suggestions, email me at jakub.krupa@theguardian.com.

I am also on Bluesky at @jakubkrupa.bsky.social and on X at @jakubkrupa.

Ukraine is ready to negotiate but not to surrender, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister Yuliia Svyrydenko said as details emerged in media reports of a US proposal for a deal which would see Ukraine give up almost all territory currently occupied by Russia.

“There will be no agreement that hands Russia the stronger foundations it needs to regroup and return with greater violence,” Svyrydenko wrote on X.

“A full ceasefire – on land, in the air, and at sea – is the necessary first step,” she said, adding that if Moscow instead opted for a limited pause, Kyiv would respond in kind.

For all the latest on Ukraine, follow our special live blog here:

EU trade commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis is in the US as he continues to look for a way out of the trade standoff between the bloc and the new Trump administration.

Speaking at an IMF and World Bank meeting, he said that “the European Union is not giving up on our closest, deepest and most important partnership with the United States,” AFP reported.

But he added that while the EU’s first preference is to reach a negotiated solution with the United States over trade, if discussions with the US do not lead to a solution, the EU will respond with countermeasures, Reuters said.

Dombrovskis said that the EU had already offered to buy more US LNG and to reduce tariffs on certain goods, and added that the EU would welcome more clarity from the US about its expectations.

Denmark’s King Frederik will travel to Greenland, a semi-autonomous Danish territory, on 28 April, the Royal House confirmed.

Reuters noted that the visit to Greenland by Denmark’s head of state comes as US president Donald Trump seeks a takeover by the United States of the minerals-rich and strategically important island.

According to a note published by the Royal House, the monarch will meet with members of the new Greenlandic government and visit Station Nord, “the northernmost military and scientific station in Greenland.”

He will also attend the SIRIUS Dog Sled Patrol.

Greenland’s prime minister Jens Frederik-Nielsen will travel to Denmark on 26 April, where he will meet with Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen, according to Greenlandic daily Sermitsiaq, reported by Reuters.

The king will travel to Greenland together with Nielsen when the prime minister returns to the island, Reuters said.

Polish foreign minister Radosław Sikorski told Russia “you will never rule here again,” as he presented to parliament the government’s priorities in foreign policy.

“Stop fantasising about another conquest of Warsaw and focus your concerns on keeping Haishenwai,” he said, provocatively using the Chinese name for the Russian city of Vladivostok.

In a wide-ranging speech, Sikorski said Europe’s goal “should not be to forge a shaky ceasefire, but a lasting and just peace” in Ukraine.

He said:

“The result of Russia’s war against Ukraine will define our region’s security level for years to come.

It will determine for example whether Belarus will sink into the russkiy mir for good, or whether it will manage to preserve the last shreds of its autonomy.

It will constitute a point of reference for the European aspirations of Moldova, Georgia, and Armenia.

It will also affect the foreign policy of important partners in Central Asia who look to both Moscow and Beijing, but who are also seeking closer ties with Europe.”

He added that “any arrangement with the Kremlin will only last so long as the Russian elite dreads the consequences of its breach.”

Speaking about Poland’s European policy, he said the government was negotiating a new treaty with France, hoped for closer ties with the new German government in Berlin, and called for broader reset in relations post-Brexit Britain as he insisted “we share interests and values.”

Sikorski also called for closer relationship with the new US administration, saying “we do not need a trade war; we need to work together in our transatlantic family.”

You can read the full speech here.

Let’s take a quick look at other events around Europe.

The death of Pope Francis led to an abrupt uptick in viewership of Conclave, Edward Berger’s thriller which depicts the events following the death of a fictional pope, and the cardinals wrangling to replace him.

The film, which won best picture at the Baftas earlier this year and was nominated for eight Oscars, is available on assorted streaming platforms worldwide. According to Luminate, which tracks streaming viewership, Conclave was viewed for about 1.8m minutes on 20 April, and 6.9m minutes the next day – an increase of 283%.

The film, directed by Edward Berger, luxuriated in process both sacred and profane – the orderly processions and cafeteria run-ins, the ceremonial burning of paper votes and security screenings, the white smoke and the complimentary toiletries bags. The hallowed halls of the Vatican and the gossip that flits among them, especially as different factions compete to see their vision cemented by the most powerful religious leader in the world.

As a deft and highly entertaining thriller on the furtive process of electing a new pope, well, you can expect people to consider Conclave as close to documentary as laypeople can get to the action. But how accurate is it?

According to experts, more spot-on than not, and at the very least meticulously researched.

The first time he spoke to Pope Francis during the pontiff’s nightly calls to the Holy Family Catholic church in Gaza City, the congregant George Antone, 44, found himself at a loss for words.

It was October 2023, a few weeks after Hamas ignited a devastating war in the Gaza Strip by attacking Israel. The Palestinian territory’s tiny Christian community had taken shelter in the strip’s three churches, but that didn’t mean they were safe. An Israeli airstrike had just hit the Greek Orthodox church, killing 18 people; soon, snipers and bombs would also kill civilians at the Holy Family.

“I was so shy when Father Yousef handed me the phone, and there was his holiness on the screen looking at me. I thought, ‘Am I dreaming, what do I talk to him about?’ He was smiling and sweet, he asked me about what I’d had to eat that day, about my family,” Antone said.

“We spoke about everything. He got to know all of us … Despite everything on his shoulders in this world he cared about us in Gaza. It feels like we have lost our father.”

Gaza’s population has endured terrible losses over 18 months of war. Although they never met in person, Francis’s diligent calls every night for a year and a half let the Palestinian territory’s Christian community know they were not forgotten, and his death on Monday has come as a hard blow.

Read this report from Bethan McKernan in Jerusalem and Malak A Tantesh in Gaza:

As head of the Catholic church, Pope Francis’s appeal went far beyond those within his congregation. Many appreciated his views on the environment, his calls for ending poverty and inequality and for his compassionate approach to the papacy.

Here, people from around the world recall their memories of the pontiff and pay tribute ahead of the conclave to choose his successor.

Maria Lobão, 50, teacher, Portugal:

The atheist that I am will miss this good-humoured, smiling, generous, intellectually clever and outspoken pope who preferred modesty to glamour and honours. I also appreciated his sense of mercy and ecumenical spirit. He transmitted a real feeling of decency and sincerity. He even enjoyed football!

Robert, Poland:

I was a volunteer during the 2016 World Youth Day in Kraków. During the meeting with volunteers, which we waited for the whole week, the pope started reading the text that he had prepared for us in English.

Perhaps because of the energy and cheerfulness of all the young people who gathered there, at some point he threw his notes in the air and started speaking Spanish. After this, many volunteers from Latin America and Latin language countries became ecstatic.

I didn’t understand Spanish, which made me a little disappointed, but soon after the happy atmosphere was passed on to others too. The pope felt visibly more spontaneous and at ease, making eye contact and cheering everyone up. It’s a beautiful memory.

Amanda, Suffolk:

I’m a lapsed Catholic and Francis was an inspiration to people like me. He was prepared to stand up to the conservative, unforgiving elements of the church and also to politicians. His clear love for all individuals, including the poorest, was inspiring. He clearly made mistakes because he was fallible like all humans. I think some progressives expected too much, taking into account the environment in which he was working. His visit to refugees in Lesbos says everything about him.

I feel I’ve lost someone close to me. I wish he could have lived much longer to deliver much more needed change, but we must appreciate everything he did and celebrate that. Sadly I think there will be external influences on many cardinals with voting rights, from the US and conservative-minded countries elsewhere, resulting in a much less compassionate pope. I truly hope I am wrong.

Enesa, 53, lawyer, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina:

He was a unique person who inspired Catholics and non-Catholics. I’m a Muslim and Pope Francis was my inspiration.

He is a role model on how religious leaders should be. Unfortunately, nowadays such leaders don’t exist.

Read all tributes here:

I was among the first group of journalists who were taken to see the pope lying in state. The queue to St Peter’s Basilica is absolutely massive and moving very slowly, but people are very patient.

Seeing Pope Francis was an emotional experience, but what struck me was the simplicity of his coffin, which is how he had always planned his funeral to be.

What you see inside St Peter’s Basilica is a very simple wooden casket which is simply lined with an elegant red cloth and the pope is wearing his red vestments and holding a rosary.

As one Italian pilgrim said to me, one thing that struck her was how youthful he looked.

She also mentioned that there were there a lot of young people queueing here today and I’d noted that as well. She felt that Pope Francis did manage to strike a chord with the young people.

We were due to have the canonisation of what will be the Catholic church’s first millennial saint Carlo Acutis on Sunday but that event has been suspended for now.

One word that that keeps coming back when I ask people what they think of Pope Francis is they talk about his humility.

For most people that was probably the most important characteristic and one that, at least according to the people I’ve been speaking to, they hope that the new pope will also have.

Let’s go to our Rome correspondent Angela Giuffrida, who is on the ground in the Vatican and just visited St Peter’s Basilica to see the pope and speak with pilgrims.

A powerful earthquake with a magnitude of 6.2 hit the Marmara Sea near the western outskirts of Istanbul on Wednesday, officials said, with the impact felt across Turkey’s largest city where people rushed onto the streets, AFP reported.

“An earthquake of 6.2 magnitude occurred in Silivri, Marmara Sea, Istanbul,” interior minister Ali Yerlikaya said on X.

You can get a sense of how strong the earthquake was in this clip capturing the impact as CNN Turk was on air with a studio chat.

There is also a lot happening today on Ukraine, after London peace talks expected to take place on ministerial level were postponed at the very last minute, with meetings downgraded to official level and closed to media.

In the last half hour, US vice-president JD Vance warned that Moscow and Kyiv must strike a deal or Washington will end its efforts to reach a ceasefire.

“We’ve issued a very explicit proposal to both the Russians and the Ukrainians, and it’s time for them to either say yes, or for the United States to walk away from this process,” Vance told reporters in India, AFP reported.

You can follow all the latest updates here:

For what it’s worth, commission deputy chief spokesperson Arianna Podestà insisted the Apple and Meta decisions were “about enforcement, not about trade negotiations” with the US.

She said:

“It’s very distinct matters, completely separate.

We have a regulation. We are applying the regulation. We apply it, of course, in the same way to all companies here.

We had a decision in the making that you have been asking us about for a while. We have concluded the technical work on these decisions. We have said, so, I think, past, in the past couple of weeks, and then we have been drafting the decision.

Of course, there are legal aspects to be taken into account in when drafting a decision, because it has to be sound from a legal perspective. When the decision was ready, we adopted it, and this is where we stand today.”

But she faced strong criticism from journalists for both commissioners responsible for the fine not taking part in the press conference, and leaving it to spokespeople to communicate their decisions.

“We don’t hold back decisions for communication purposes. We need to enforce our regulation now,” Podestà replied.

In other European news elsewhere, the European Commission has just issued massive fines against US tech giants Apple and Meta for breaching its digital regulation, the Digital Markets Act.

The commission found that Apple breached the DMA’s “anti-steering obligation” for developers of apps distributed on App Store and has been fined €500m.

Separately, Meta was fined €200m for “breaching the DMA obligation to give consumers the choice of a service that uses less of their personal data after introducing a Consent or Pay model in 2023.

The full explanation for both decisions is here.

European Commission executive vice-president Teresa Ribera said the decisions “send a strong and clear message,” fining the companies for falling short of compliance with the rulebook.

“As a result, we have taken firm but balanced enforcement action against both companies, based on clear and predictable rules. All companies operating in the EU must follow our laws and respect European values,” she said.

But the move is likely to trigger an angry reaction from the US, as president Donald Trump repeatedly criticised EU regulations and what he perceived as taking aim at US companies.

Given the already tricky EU-US relations as a result of Trump’s aggressive trade policy, this could see the tensions rise further.

Alexis Corbière, a leftwing French MP in Seine-Saint-Denis, has criticised the French government’s decision to fly flags at halfmast on public buildings in France on Saturday on the day of Pope Francis’ funeral.

Corbière said that France was a secular Republic built on a clear separation of church and state, this meant it had a duty to remain neutral towards all religions and not give special treatment to one religion over another.

He told France Info he was also shocked that the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and two French ministers, would attend the pope’s funeral.

He said French secularism shouldn’t be a “variable principle” that changes according to the religion.

“If tomorrow the Dalai Lama dies, clearly French flags won’t fly at half mast. Clearly the head of state wouldn’t go to a funeral in the same way for a Muslim religious leader or a Jewish religious leader.”

In 2005, when Pope John Paul II died, some French politicians also cited French secularism to question the government’s decision to fly flags at half mast.