In the time of the coronavirus, the symbolic motifs of religion have turned literal. Lent, the forty-day season of preparation for Easter, is usually a time of symbolic deprivation: giving up meat on Fridays, giving up chocolate, giving up unkindness, giving up carbon.
This year’s lent began on February 26th—the coronavirus has demanded quite literal deprivation: no going out, no eating out, no shopping, no seeing friends.
For too many people, it has brought the pain of job loss, illness, and death. Ambulance sirens ring out constantly in the otherwise empty streets of New York City, in what would normally be a time of seasonal renewal and spiritual hope, bringing to mind two essentially Biblical responses to this moment.
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One is the hope is that the virus will “pass over” our homes, especially if we “mark” them by doing all the right things (washing our hands, disinfecting the counters, stocking the freezer).
The other is the expectation that a time of self-sacrifice will eventually come for us all, and with it the hope that self-sacrifice is part of our better nature, and has implications beyond ourselves.
We have already seen extraordinary self-sacrifice on the part of the doctors, nurses, paramedics, and ambulance drivers who daily put themselves in the way of the coronavirus to care for others.
A religion that cannot speak with authority to the suffering and death all around us would seem to be no religion at all. What, then, does Pope Francis, the spiritual leader to more than a billion people around the world, have to say to all this?
Catholics have watched and listened to him for weeks, as the pandemic has put both the Pope and the habits of their faith to a test—but also made the central themes of his pontificate especially apt.
Francis’s most direct response to the pandemic has been a striking use of papal ritual. He swiftly arranged to give the traditional papal address Urbi et Orbi, “To the City and the World”—which is usually given only on Christmas Day, Easter Sunday, and immediately after the election of a Pope—on the evening of Friday, March 27th, just as the curve of the virus in Italy was reaching its peak.
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He situated the message within a ritual the likes of which St. Peter’s Square had never seen. The “extraordinary moment of prayer” (which was broadcast live and watched by more than ten million people) was a noir tableau of the Vatican City in lockdown.
There was a heavy rain, and spotlights blazed from the colonnade of St. Peter’s Basilica, surveillance-style, onto the deserted square. Sirens cut through the silence. Francis strode toward the basilica alone, without even an umbrella, then sat under a white canopy set up in front of the building—an isolation tent, of sorts.
A cantor sang a passage from St. Mark’s Gospel, then Francis delivered the Urbi et Orbi message, in which he proposed that the current crisis might induce a transformation of global society from one based on greed to one oriented toward good.
A couple of the Vatican’s treasures associated with deliverance from calamity were brought out for the event: the Pope prayed to a fifth-century icon of the Virgin Mary, known as the Protectress of the Roman People, and kissed the foot of a Christ on the cross that is believed to have protected Rome from a plague in 1522.
Later, at an altar set up in the basilica’s entryway, he lifted the gold Eucharistic vessel known as a monstrance and, with some difficulty, carried it to the church’s threshold, brandishing it in blessing, as Moses brandished his staff as protection during the Exodus.
Francis’s take on the gospel passage was more straightforward: Jesus and the Apostles are in a boat at sea, when a storm hits. Jesus is sleeping, and the others, annoyed, wake him. Doesn’t he care about what they’re going through? He tells them not to worry—to just have faith.
Now we, too, are in a storm, Francis said, but we are all truly in the same boat, and God is with us. The lesson was fairly standard, homiletically speaking, but it hardly mattered. The image of the solitary Pope in prayer sent an unforgettable message of its own.
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Yet that image, perhaps inadvertently, also spoke to the limits of religion right now. Catholic churches, worldwide, are comprehensively closed for the first time in historical memory. Eight people who work in the Vatican have tested positive for covid-19, among them the Pope’s vicar for Rome, Cardinal Angelo De Donatis, who was hospitalized.
The usual pomp and splendour have been put away: rather than celebrating Sunday Mass before thousands of people in the basilica, Francis, wearing his everyday vestments, live-streams services from a plain chapel in the guesthouse where he lives, offering prayers for medics, volunteers, homeless people, and those left lonely by shelter-in-place orders.
Holy Week has been cut back to the bone. Last Sunday, Palm Sunday, Francis celebrated Mass in the rear of the nearly empty basilica, at an altar built around a chair said to have been St. Peter’s, with the fabled cross and icon set up nearby, and a handful of clerics and nuns socially distanced in pews behind him. The Way of the Cross—a papal event staged every year around the Colosseum—has been cancelled.
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