Pandemic locks down globe-trotting Pope Francis
ROME — On the March day that Italy recorded its single biggest jump in coronavirus fatalities, Pope Francis emerged fromlockdown to offffffffffffer an extraordinary prayer and plea to his flflock to reassess their priorities, arguing the virus had proved they needed one another.
Francis’ words from the rain-slicked promenade of St. Peter’s Basilica encapsulated the core messages he has emphasized during his seven-year pontifificate: solidarity, social justice andcare for the most vulnerable.
But the dramatic moment also under scored how isolated the pope had become during theCOVID-19emergencyand a sustained season of opposition from his conservative critics: He was utterly alone before aninvisibleenemy, preaching to a hauntingly empty piazza.
During the virus crisis, Francis has become a 21 st century “prisoner of the Vatican,” as one of his predecessors was once known, robbed of the crowds, foreign travel and visits to the peripheries that so defifined and popularized his papa cy. He will resume physical contact with his fl flock this week with revived Wednesday general audiences, but the meetings will be held in aninternal Vaticancourtyard before a limited crowd rather thanthevastSt. Peter’sSquare.
After weeks during which Italy brought the virusunder control, the country’ s case load is rebounding — now adding more than 1,000 new infections a day—so there’ s no telling when or how more ambitious public gathering sand travel might return.
What does all this mean for a 83-year-old globe-trotting pope and his ministry to the 1.2- billion- member
Catholic Church?
Alberto Melloni, a church historian usually sympathetic to Francis, declared that the pandemicmarked the beginning of the end of Francis’ pontifificate. In a recent essay, he assertedthat tensions that had percolated throughout the papacy came to the surface during the lockdown, and won’t fade even after COVID-19 is tamed.
“In every papacy there’s a historic point afterwhichthe fi final phase begins, which can lastyears,” Melloniwrote. For Francis, “this point was the pandemic and his solitude before the virus.”
There are rumors Francis iswriting anewencyclical for thepost-COVID-19world, but fornowa key part ofhismessage is embodied by a Vatican commission helping local church leaders ensure that the needs of the poorest are met nowand after the emergency fades.
The commission is providing concrete assistance —every month or so the Vatican announces a new delivery of ventilators to a developing country—as well as policy recommendations for how governments and institutions can re-think global economic,
social, health care and other structures to bemore equitable and sustainable.
All summer there have been reports of priests, nuns and ordinary folk around the world receiving one of Francis’ famous “cold calls:” a bishop inMozambique dealingwith cholera andmalaria outbreaks as well as a Muslim insurgency; anArgentine nun who cares for transsexual women.
Whilesuchfeel-goodstories have occasionally leaked out during the Vatican’s typically slow summer, they haven’t dr owned out the steady drumbeat of criticism in U.S. Catholic media from Francis’ conservative opponents, a small but vocal wing of the church.
They have used his relative isolation to continue their demands for accountability in a two-decade cover-upof the actions of American ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, whomFrancis defrockedlast year after a Vatican investigation concluded he sexually abusedminors andadult seminarians.
Francis still hasn’t released areport intowhat theVatican knewandwhen aboutMcCarrick, twoyears after promising to do so.