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| Cardinal Martini's body is lying in state in Milan Cathedral |
Italian
Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini has described the Roman Catholic Church as being
"200 years behind" the times.
The
cardinal died on Friday, aged 85.
Italian
newspaper Corriere della Sera has published his last interview, recorded in
August, in which he said: "The Church is tired... our prayer rooms are
empty."
Martini,
once tipped as a future pope, urged the Church to recognise its errors and to
embark on a radical path of change, beginning with the Pope.
Thousands
of people have been filing past his coffin at Milan's cathedral, where he was
archbishop for more than 20 years.
The
cardinal, who had retired from the post in 2002, suffering from Parkinson's
Disease, is to be buried on Monday.
'Old
culture'
Martini, a
popular figure with liberal stances on many issues, commanded great respect
from both Pope John Paul II and his successor Pope Benedict XVI.
The
cardinal - a member of the Jesuit religious order - was often critical in his
writings and comments on Church teaching, says the BBC's David Willey in Rome.
He was a
courageous and outspoken figure during the years he headed Europe's largest
Catholic diocese, our correspondent says.
In his last
interview, given to a fellow Jesuit priest less than a month ago and published
the day after his death, the cardinal made sweeping criticisms of the Catholic
Church.
Catholics
lacked confidence in the Church, he said. "Our culture has grown old, our
churches are big and empty and the church bureaucracy rises up, our religious
rites and the vestments we wear are pompous."
Unless the
Church adopted a more generous attitude towards divorced persons, it will lose
the allegiance of future generations, the cardinal added. The question, he
said, is not whether divorced couples can receive holy communion, but how the
Church can help complex family situations.
And the
advice he leaves behind to conquer the tiredness of the Church was a
"radical transformation, beginning with the Pope and his bishops".
"The
child sex scandals oblige us to undertake a journey of transformation,"
Cardinal Martini says, referring to the child sex abuse that has rocked the
Catholic Church in the past few years.
He was not
afraid, our correspondent adds, to speak his mind on matters that the Vatican
sometimes considered taboo, including the use of condoms to fight Aids and the
role of women in the Church.
In 2008,
for example, he criticised the Church's prohibition of birth control, saying
the stance had likely driven many faithful away, and publicly stated in 2006
that condoms could "in some situations, be a lesser evil".
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