Thousands of faithful bid farewell to Milan’s late cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, seen as a hero by reform-minded Catholics, at his funeral in the northern city’s cathedral yesterday.

Those unable to follow the ceremony inside the Duomo watched Cardinal Angelo Comastri, Pope Benedict XVI’s representative, read out a Papal message that was beamed onto two giant screens.

The head of the Roman Catholic Church praised Cardinal Martini as “generous and faithful”, and said he had shown “an open mind, never refusing encounters and dialogue”.

He was “attentive in all situations, close, lovingly, to those who were at a loss, poor or suffering”, said the Pope.

Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti and a large number of political leaders attended the funeral.

About 200,000 mourners had flocked to the Gothic cathedral since Saturday to pay their final respects to the former archbishop of Milan, who warned in an interview published posthumously that the Church was “200 years behind”.

Cardinal Martini, who commanded widespread respect and advocated reform on issues such as contraception and women in the Church, died aged 85 on Friday after battling Parkinson’s disease for about 15 years.

In his last interview, conducted by a fellow Jesuit in early August and published in the Corriere della Sera newspaper on Saturday, Cardinal Martini asked: “The Church has been left 200 years behind. Why doesn’t it rouse itself? Are we afraid?”

The cardinal, who had been tipped as a possible future Pope after the death of Benedict XVI’s predecessor John Paul II in 2005, never tired of his quest to modernise the staunchly traditional institution, openly questioning the Church on contentious issues such as the clerical sex-abuse scandal and divorce.