Pope makes another surprise appearance at St. Peter's, greeting restorers of papal tombs

ROME (AP) — Two art restorers were putting the final touches on a months-long restoration of the tomb of Pope Urban VIII, who in 1626 consecrated St. Peter’s Basilica, when the convalescing Pope Francis appeared, unannounced, in a wheelchair — his third such surprise appearance in less than a week.

Francis thrilled the crowd at St. Peter’s during a Jubilee Mass for the ill on Sunday, met privately with King Charles III and Queen Camilla on Wednesday, before the impromptu turn through St. Peter’s Basilica on Thursday.

“We didn’t know if we could approach him. We greeted him from afar,’’ Lorena Araujo Pinheiro said on Friday as officials unveiled the last of three restoration projects in the basilica for the Jubilee Holy Year, an ancient church tradition encouraging the faithful to make pilgrimages to Rome. Then the pope and three people accompanying him motioned for the two restorers to come closer.

“He thanked us many times for the work,’’ said Michela Malfatti. “Then he asked me if he could take my hand because his were cold. He was very sweet with us.’’

Both, in turn, gave them their hands.

The Vatican said that Francis was getting some air that day from his convalescence in the Santa Marta Domus, a block of church apartments, and asked to be brought to St. Peter’s Basilica to pray. The pontiff is in his third week of doctor-ordered rest after nearly dying from double pneumonia, and doctors have advised him to avoid large gatherings.

Besides the restorers, Francis greeted the faithful who had come to Mass or to walk through the Holy Door for the Jubilee Year. Video of several encounters posted on social media showed the pope wearing a long-sleeve white shirt with a poncho-like blanket folded over his chest for warmth as he greeted a boy in one video, and then a baby in another.

The restoration work on the tombs of Pope Urban VIII, sculpted by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, and the basilica's founder, Pope Paul II, by Guglielmo della Porta was completed on Thursday just as the pope arrived. It was the last stage of a three-part restoration, after the ornate canopy over the main altar, and the gilded bronze monument that holds the throne of St. Peter, said Pietro Zander, head of the necropolis and artistic heritage section of the Fabbrica di San Pietro that maintains the basilica.

The papal tombs now appear more “sparkling,’’ Zander said.

An important change on Urban VIII's tomb was to remove a sculpted cloth that had covered the bare breast of a female figure called “Charity,’’ who is depicted putting aside a sated child she has just nursed for another that is crying to be fed.

“It was decided to free her from this veil, and it doesn’t seem to me to be anything offensive,’’ Zander said. “Malice is always in the eyes of who is looking.’’

The Vatican also unveiled new lighting in the necropolis where popes are buried beneath the main altar, and the addition of stone ramps leading into the basilica that were installed for safety reasons in case of a need to quickly evacuate a crowd from the basilica.

The pope’s decision to come to the basilica and check out the works was an encouraging sign.

“We take it like a blessing of the end of the work,’’ Zander said.

The recent restoration of Bernini's Cathedra Petriis is displayed to journalists inside St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican, Friday, April 11, 2025. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)

St. Peter's Basilica is pictured during a press tour to present the recent restoration of the funerary monuments of Popes Paul III and Urban VIII inside St. Peter's Basilica, and the lighting redevelopment of the Necropolis, the Archaeological Halls and the Vatican Grottoes, at the Vatican, Friday, April 11, 2025. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)

St. Peter's Basilica is pictured during a press tour to present the recent restoration of the funerary monuments of Popes Paul III and Urban VIII inside St. Peter's Basilica, and the lighting redevelopment of the Necropolis, the Archaeological Halls and the Vatican Grottoes, at the Vatican, Friday, April 11, 2025. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)

The recent restoration of the funerary monument of Urban VIII is displayed to journalists inside St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican, Friday, April 11, 2025. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)

St. Peter's Basilica is pictured during a press tour to present the recent restoration of the funerary monuments of Popes Paul III and Urban VIII inside St. Peter's Basilica, and the lighting redevelopment of the Necropolis, the Archaeological Halls and the Vatican Grottoes, at the Vatican, Friday, April 11, 2025. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)

Peter's Basilica is pictured during a press tour to present the recent restoration of the funerary monuments of Popes Paul III and Urban VIII inside St. Peter's Basilica, and the lighting redevelopment of the Necropolis, the Archaeological Halls and the Vatican Grottoes, at the Vatican, Friday, April 11, 2025. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)

The recent restoration of the funerary monument of Urban VIII is displayed to journalists inside St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican, Friday, April 11, 2025. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)

The recent restoration of the funerary monument of Pope Paul III is displayed to journalists inside St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican, Friday, April 11, 2025. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)

The recent restoration of the funerary monument of Urban VIII is displayed to journalists inside St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican, Friday, April 11, 2025. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)

WASHINGTON (AP) — When acting Attorney General Todd Blanche signed off on a nearly $1.8 billion fund meant to compensate President Donald Trump's allies for alleged political prosecution, he may have pleased his boss.

But the eyebrow-raising move — the latest in his push to prove his loyalty to Trump — has agitated the same Republican lawmakers he would need to secure the permanent job.

Blanche insists he’s not auditioning for the job of attorney general. But a succession of splashy steps the Justice Department has taken under his watch since he took the position on an acting basis last month, including an indictment of former FBI Director James Comey, has left no doubt about the impression he’s hoping to make on the president who appointed him.

The fund in particular has put Blanche at the center of a Republican firestorm at a time when he aims to establish himself as the perfect person for the job for the remainder of Trump’s term. And it sharpened concerns from Democrats and other Blanche critics that he has not shed his mantle as the president’s personal attorney.

“So the nation’s top law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops? Utterly stupid, morally wrong — Take your pick,” Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the former majority leader, said in a statement.

A former federal prosecutor in New York, Blanche came to public prominence for his lead role on Trump's defense team, including during the Republican's hush money trial in New York. That perch afforded him, he has said, a firsthand look at what he contends was the weaponization of the criminal justice system against Trump.

He was brought into the Justice Department as deputy attorney general, the No. 2 job, then was elevated last month after Trump ousted Pam Bondi.

Now he finds himself the latest Trump-appointed attorney general to simultaneously confront expectations from subordinates to uphold institutional norms and demands from the president to do his bidding.

Trump's first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, was forced out after the 2018 midterms after infuriating the president over his recusal from an investigation into ties between Russia and the 2016 presidential campaign. Another, William Barr, resigned after their relationship fizzled over Barr's refusal to back Trump's baseless claims of massive election fraud. Bondi was removed after struggling to bring successful prosecutions against Trump's political opponents.

Two weeks after becoming acting attorney general, Blanche announced the appointment of Joseph diGenova, an 81-year-old former Justice Department prosecutor from the Reagan administration, to a special position inside the department. He'll oversee a Florida-based investigation into whether former law enforcement and intelligence officials conspired over the last decade to undermine Trump.

“At some point, at the right time, that will be made public and the American people will see exactly what happened to this administration and President Trump over the past decade," Blanche told Fox News.

Prior government reviews of the FBI's Trump-Russia investigation, a centerpiece of the current conspiracy investigation, have failed to produce criminal charges against senior officials or evidence of criminal conduct by them. It's not clear what, if any, new information the continuing investigation has developed.

The Justice Department also last month obtained an indictment charging Comey, a Trump foe whose prosecution the president has long called for, with threatening Trump through a social media photo of seashells in the numerical arrangement of “86 47" — a case legal experts say will be challenging for prosecutors. Comey has said he wouldn't be surprised if the Justice Department pursues additional indictments.

In other moves, Blanche announced an indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit that has been the target of conservative outrage, with misleading donors about its activities, and has publicly defended a Justice Department crackdown on leaks to the news media, including subpoenas to reporters.

Arguably the most audacious demonstration of loyalty to Trump came this week when the Justice Department announced the creation of a $1.776 billion fund to compensate people who feel they've been unjustly investigated and prosecuted, coupled with a guarantee of immunity from tax audits for Trump and his eldest sons.

As Republican concerns grew, Blanche held a tense meeting with GOP lawmakers Thursday. Shortly afterward, Senate Republicans abruptly left Washington without voting on a roughly $70 billion bill to fund immigration enforcement agencies.

Blanche, who defended the fund at a congressional hearing this week, has said anyone who believes they've been persecuted can apply for compensation regardless of political affiliation. But the fund has been widely understood as a boon to Trump allies investigated during the Biden administration.

“It’s pretty clear that he’s not the attorney general for the United States as much as he's the attorney general for President Trump,” said Stephen Saltzburg, a George Washington University law professor and senior Justice Department official in the 1980s. He said Blanche would get an A+ if report cards were issued for fealty to Trump.

David Laufman, a former chief of staff to the deputy attorney general in President George W. Bush's administration, said that rather than protecting the Justice Department's independence, Blanche has been a “willing and ardent accomplice for carrying out any partisan or corrupt scheme the White House may devise.”

Blanche’s supporters dismiss the suggestion he is trying to curry favor with Trump to secure the permanent job.

“What he is doing is he is seeking justice based on facts and the law,” said Jay Town, who served as a U.S. attorney in Alabama during the first Trump administration. “And I don’t think that will ever change about him, whether he is the attorney general going forward or doesn’t spend another day in the administration. He is an honorable man and anybody that knows him knows that to be true.”

Blanche also says he is not angling to keep his job or feeling pressure to placate Trump.

He has told reporters he would be honored to be nominated but, "if he chooses to nominate somebody else and asks me to go do something else, I will say, ‘Thank you very much. I love you, sir.’ I don’t have any goals or aspirations beyond that.”

In recent days, he's functioned as the fund's public face and most visible defender, a role consistent with his comfort in the spotlight. He sometimes holds multiple press conferences a week and grants interviews to a variety of news outlets, a contrast to Bondi, who largely stuck to Fox News appearances.

His defenders say his experience as a federal prosecutor has made him a more sophisticated communicator for the department than Bondi, but his statements have at times invited backlash, including his refusal to rule out that violent Jan. 6 rioters could be eligible for payouts.

Though Blanche will appoint the five commissioners tasked with processing claims, his precise role in the fund’s implementation is unclear. He told CNN it was developed through negotiations with Trump’s private lawyers, not him.

For some Democrats, that's a difference without a distinction.

“Mr. Attorney General, you are acting today like the president's personal attorney," Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat, told Blanche during a combative exchange in a Senate hearing, "and that's the whole problem."

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche arrives for a closed-door meeting with Republican senators who are expected to abandon a proposal for $1 billion in security money for the White House complex and President Donald Trump's ballroom after it has failed to win enough party support, at the Capitol in Washington, Thursday, May 21, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche arrives for a closed-door meeting with Republican senators who are expected to abandon a proposal for $1 billion in security money for the White House complex and President Donald Trump's ballroom after it has failed to win enough party support, at the Capitol in Washington, Thursday, May 21, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)