Who is that person the mighty are coming to bury in Rome tomorrow? Is it for the man who preached against burning fossil fuels that the great and the good are flying in their intercontinental jets to pay their last respects? Are the would-be colonisers and land-grabbers gathering to praise the peace-lover who Zoom-called Catholics under siege in Gaza at 7pm every night? What part of a man who chose to live more humbly than his predecessors will be reflected in the pomp and circumstance of his funeral?

WH Auden wrote in the poem he entitled In Memory of WB Yeats that “the words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living”. Pope Francis tried to guard against such modification by requesting that he be laid to rest in just one coffin instead of the traditional three papal coffins made of elm, cypress and lead, and that he be buried with dignity “like any Christian”. But he could not prevent his death from turning into a spectacle of the sort of privilege and hypocrisy he deprecated. Nor could he stop his spirit being banished before he is even........

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