A president, a pope, and the order of things to come

A funeral for the world to witness

In the trembling April light of St. Peter’s Square, as a slow Mass unspooled for a departed pontiff, the choreography of the living carried a charge. Among the black-clad mourners, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and First Lady Liza Araneta-Marcos sat composed, almost still, their posture suggesting both reverence and a studied belonging. Around them gathered a certain architecture of the world’s power: U.S. President Donald Trump, King Felipe of Spain, French President Emmanuel Macron, and the haloed presence of their spouses, each a careful node in a network of influence.

Funerals, for all their declarations of common grief, are rarely only about the dead. This one, a rare funeral for a sitting pope—Pope Francis, the reformer whose papacy was both adored and resisted—became, inevitably, an unwitting theater for the living to announce themselves: who stood where, who grieved how, who was seen.

The weight of Catholic identity

That Marcos found himself there, among the inner chorus, is no mere accident of diplomatic calendar. In the Philippines—the only predominantly Catholic nation in Southeast Asia—the Church is not simply a religious institution but an ambient cultural force, a weather system under which history, morality, and politics unfurl. To be seen at the Vatican on a day like this is to signal a certain fidelity not just to Rome, but to the memory of an older, more theologically ordered world order, in which the Philippines has long imagined itself a spiritual satellite.

There was a poetic tension to it, almost cinematic: a president named Marcos—a name that, in Philippine memory, carries the heavy resonance of dictatorship and exile—sitting beneath the marble and gold of Christendom’s greatest temple. The Philippines, small but symbolically immense, has long traded on the currency of Catholicism in the global imagination. Its laborers are caregivers and nurses across Europe’s aging cities; its people, pilgrims and missionaries scattered across Asia’s secularizing landscape. Even now, in an age of digital fragmentation, the Filipino soul remains largely, stubbornly, Catholic—rosaries hanging from rearview mirrors, novenas whispered under breath on the MRT.

A church at a crossroads

And yet, it is a Catholicism with a curiously progressive spine. The Church in the Philippines has often aligned itself with the left: protesting corruption, championing the poor, resisting the erosions of democracy. It is no accident that whispers in Rome have long pointed toward Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle—a son of Cavite, a scholar of Vatican II’s reforms, a bishop who speaks of mercy like it is a revolutionary act—as a plausible heir to the throne of Peter. Should Tagle ascend, it would be a dizzying affirmation: the margins of the Church becoming its new center.

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In this light, Marcos’ presence in the square reads differently. Not simply as a dutiful Catholic statesman, but as a figure positioning himself—and by extension, the Philippines—closer to the heart of a global conversation about faith, relevance, and renewal. In a polarized and bruised world, where even belief feels like a contested terrain, proximity to the Church’s ceremonies offers a kind of soft power: a bridge to communities, a share in a universal grief, a reminder that identity can still be forged not only through markets or militaries, but through myth and memory.

Outside the square, the city breathed and bustled as always: vendors hawking wooden rosaries, priests weaving through traffic on battered scooters. Rome, eternal and indifferent, would not stop for even this. But inside, amid the murmuring prayers and ancient rituals, one could feel the old truths resurfacing: that death is a spectacle for the living, that grief is an act of politics as much as of love, and that in the Catholic imagination—stretched now between continents and ideologies—every seat at the table is a declaration of where one believes the future will begin.

Photos courtesy NewsPlus and Vatican News