When Lily Rivera planned her trip to Rome for the weekend of April 25, 2025, she knew that she was going to witness an influential moment in Church history. She just wasn’t expecting that moment to be the mourning and funeral Mass of Pope Francis.
Rivera, a high school theology and math teacher at Cantwell-Sacred Heart of Mary High School in Montebello, planned to come to the Eternal City for the canonization of Carlo Acutis, which was originally scheduled for April 27. Like countless others who planned to be in Rome during the last weekend in April, when Rivera and her husband heard about the passing of the Holy Father, they decided to keep their travel plans.
“We just stopped and said a prayer and said ‘OK, Lord, let your will be done,’ ” Rivera said.
Alongside an estimated 250,000 people, several SoCal natives were part in a rare moment that united the global Church in Rome to mourn Pope Francis, celebrate his pontificate, and pray for the College of Cardinals as they prepare to select the 266nd successor of Peter.
“I thought I was coming for a canonization,” Father James Nieblas, a Salesian priest and member of the Juañeno Band of Mission Indians said. “But that morning when we found out that Francis had passed away, I was coming to say goodbye to a friend that I had met in Washington, D.C.”
Pope Francis left a deep impression on Nieblas, who met the Holy Father during Junipero Serra's canonization in 2015. Before the funeral Mass, Nieblas traveled to Assisi to reflect on the late pontiff’s namesake.
“The most moving thing was to see [Pope Francis] on Easter Sunday,” Father Nieblas said. “It was a true sign of happiness and saying to us, ‘It’s your Church now.’ ”
Patrick Magat of Christ the King Church in Hollywood, had helped bring a Carlo Acutis exhibit to the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. But instead of attending Acutis’ canonization, he found himself waiting with hundreds of thousands to visit the body of Pope Francis in St. Peter’s Basilica before attending his funeral April 26.
“It’s just such a different feeling knowing that he’s gone,” Magat said. “For me it’s all about tradition [and] knowing that this goes all the way to St. Peter, all the history, all the thousands of years, and brings us all together.”
Father Michael Masteller, an LA priest ordained in 2021 now studying in Rome, concelebrated at the funeral Mass, joining hundreds of bishops and 4,000 priests. Among them was Msgr. John Moretta of Resurrection Church in East LA, whom Masteller interned with as a seminarian.
“I feel like some people in Los Angeles have helped me to enter this moment more deeply and to feel with the Church what this means,” Masteller said.
The death of Pope Francis on Easter Monday resulted in his funeral services overlapping with the Jubilee of Teenagers. That meant there were thousands of pilgrims and young people in Rome to say farewell to Pope Francis who wouldn’t have otherwise been there.
“You just see the diversity, the different people, the different languages, different types of devotions, but we’re still worshipping the same God and paying our respects to Pope Francis,” Rivera said.
Anticipation for who will be the next pope builds across the world as the College of Cardinals prepare for the beginning of the conclave on May 7.
“I really encourage people to just pray and trust God, regardless of what human willingness puts forward, that the Holy Spirit will guide everything to the glory of the Father,” Masteller said.
