Hello and welcome to NewsHour from the BBC World Service.
Coming to you live from London, I'm Sean Lay.
Pope Francis devised his own variation of the traditional funeral rite,
pushing against convention to make the manner of his leaving as unconventional as the manner of his papacy.
Instead of mass said inside St Peter's Basilica,
in front of a necessarily limited number of mourners,
the celebration of his life on Saturday morning took place in the square outside,
where all were welcome.
Prostitutes, ex-prisoners, the homeless,
among the many thousands of people sharing this moment with around 150 heads of government or state.
Francis's coffin stood not on a cattle falc,
but on the ground, down where he felt he belonged among the people.
The solemn hour-long mass was leavened by the applause which greeted the coffin being carried out of the church and into the square.
This, wood lined with zinc, was much simpler than the triple casket of cypress,
lead and ochre elm in which papal remains are traditionally interred.
It was borne on his final journey across the River Tiber to the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore,
the Pope's favourite church in Rome, now his place of rest.
The BBC's Rome correspondent Sarah Rainsford reports.
As I squeezed my way through the crowd early this morning,
there were nuns and priests dashing over the cobblestones.