Doctors, nurses in Good Friday procession at Vatican
VATICAN CITY » A pair of white-coated doctors who care for coronavirus patients participated in a torch-lit Good Friday procession, watched over by Pope Francis and held in a hauntingly nearly empty St. Peter’s Square instead of at Rome’s Colosseum because of the safety measures aimed at containing the virus’ spread.
Francis presided over the late-night ceremony from the steps outside St. Peter’s Basilica as the procession circled 10 times around the square’s central obelisk, slowly following a path marked by candles set on the square’s cobblestones. Besides the two doctors, who are part of the Vatican’s health service, were a former prison inmate and the chaplain of prison in Padua, northern Italy, a uniformed penitentiary police officer and nurses.
The Way of the Cross procession, also known by its Latin name, Via Crucis, evokes Jesus suffering on his way to be crucified.
In another break with tradition, Francis didn’t deliver a homily or offer remarks at the end of the 90-minute procession. Instead, for several minutes, he prayed silently, with his head bowed and hands clasped, before a wooden crucifix which had been carried in Rome during the early 16th-century when the city was suffering through a plague.
By then, the procession participants had left the square, and except for an aide, some camera crew and very few other Vatican personnel, Francis was left alone with his thoughts as he looked out across the vast empty space, where normally tens of thousands of people attend his audiences or outdoor Masses.
During the procession, Francis listened to meditations being read aloud on the theme of suffering. Among those composing the reflections were inmates at the prison, the family of a woman slain in domestic violence, an inmate’s mother and the daughter of an inmate serving a life-sentence, the Vatican said.