Soon-to-be cardinals, including Chicago native, quarantine in pope’s hotel ahead of ceremony
ROME — The Vatican’s Santa Marta hotel was built to sequester cardinals during papal elections. It’s now sequestering soonto-be cardinals in town for this weekend’s ceremony to get their red hats: A handful are in protective coronavirus quarantine, confined to their rooms on Vatican orders and getting meals delivered to their doors.
The 10-day quarantines, with COVID-19 tests administered at the start and finish, are just one example of how Saturday’s ceremony to elevate new cardinals is like nothing the Holy See has ever seen.
“They told me it would be like this but I didn’t think it would be so strict!” marveled Cardinal-designate Felipe Arizmendi Esquivel, the retired archbishop of Chiapas, Mexico.
During a Zoom call with The Associated Press, Esquivel said he had thought there might be some exceptions to the lockdown for new cardinals. “No! Here, it doesn’t matter if you’re a cardinal or a pope. The virus doesn’t respect anyone,” he said.
Pope Francis on Saturday will elevate 13 clerics to the College of Cardinals, the elite group of red-robed churchmen whose primary task is to elect a new pope. It’s the seventh time Francis has named a new batch of cardinals since his election in 2013.
Among them is the first African American, Cardinal-designate Wilton Gregory, archbishop ofWashington, D.C.
He too is concluding his quarantine in the Santa Marta hotel, where he said his meals are left on a tray outside his door. Gregory said that while he was unable to go out, at least his new red cassock was delivered from Rome’s famous clerical haberdasher, Gammarelli.
“I have them now. They fit!” he said in a Zoom call.
Fashion aside, Gregory, a Chicago native, said he was humbled by Francis’ decision to make him a cardinal and said he would return to a United States still in the throes of the pandemic with hope that vaccines against the virus will soon work.
“I hope we can use them effectively to protect people and … once this pandemic is brought under control, to face the future with hope,” he said.