I watched the Pope's funeral on Friday – twice. First time in the morning I watched RTE, BBC or TV3, whichever station was doing the least talking. Later I watched it again (I missed big chunks of it in the morning due to too many family interruptions) on EWTN. I've watched EWTN more in the past week than in all the weeks combined since it was added to our cable system. It was easily the best station for real insight into the history and tradition of papal funerals and the coming selection process.
It was sort of interesting changing from the RTE to the BBC. The BBC felt a need to explain the Mass much more than RTE did.
My one complaint with all the coverage was the translation. Did we really need that? I was enjoying hearing the Mass in Italian/Latin and didn't need a translation to tell me what was happening. Maybe sub-titles should have been used? I was particularly surprised by EWTN because I think they could assume that most of their viewers are fairly regular Mass attendees, who wouldn't need a translation of the Liturgy of the Eucharist, for example. Didn't Mel Gibson put paid to the notion that we need everything dubbed into English?
