The virus is inside the walls of the Vatican, which has canceled public participation in Easter ceremonies, is testing scores of people and considering isolating measures for Pope Francis. ROME — The coronavirus that is threatening the world and knows no religion has penetrated the high walls of the Vatican and come to the doorstep of Pope Francis and the elderly cardinals who live near him. “For weeks now it has been evening. Thick darkness has gathered over our squares, our streets and our cities; it has taken over our lives,” Francis, who is 83 and had part of a lung removed during an illness in his youth, said in remarks hauntingly delivered on the steps of St.
Peter’s Basilica Friday evening. He spoke alone and before a vast and empty square, its cobblestones slicked with rain and reflecting the blue lights of the police locking down Rome to fight the virus. “We find ourselves afraid,” the pope added. “And lost.
” The remarks on such a dramatic and grand stage amounted to a change of course for the pontiff, who throughout the first weeks of the coronavirus crisis in Italy — now the world’s deadliest outbreak — tended to talk about other things, or addressed the issue via live stream. When he came down with a bad cold last month, he refused to address whether he had been tested for the virus; some employees have grumbled about offices having stayed open too long. But the Vatican confirmed on Tuesday cases of the virus inside its walls, and on Wednesday reports emerged that an Italian Vatican official who lives in the pope’s residence had tested positive and required hospitalization. Now the Vatican, which has also essentially canceled all public participation in Easter ceremonies, is testing scores of people and considering isolating measures for Francis.
Top Vatican officials said Francis has had negative results to two separate tests and has said privately he doesn’t have the virus. And as is the case with most governments, some have questioned the Vatican’s handling of the crisis. Rev. Mauro Cozzoli, 73, a professor of moral theology at the Lateran Pontifical University, where he lives, said “until four days ago everyone was still forced to go to the office.
” Now, he said, “they activated the smart working from home, and here in the offices people go in shifts. ” He said there was tension, with the cardinals who run the congregations keeping offices open against the opposition of workers. “They said, ‘We did it because this was the Pope’s will,’” he said, adding he did not know if that was in fact the pope’s order. The Vatican declined to comment on Friday.
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What is clear is that a new anxiety has seized Vatican City, with about 600 citizens and a population of about 246 people behind the Vatican walls. About 100 of the residents are young Swiss Guards, but the remaining denizens include the pope, a handful of older cardinals, the people who work in their households, and some laymen, making it in some ways as vulnerable as a nursing home to a virus that can be devastating to the old. Cardinal Giovanni Lajolo, 85, the president emeritus of the Vatican City State, acknowledged that elderly people like himself were the “first candidates” and joked that given the elderly population of Vatican City, “the only place more quiet than this is the cemetery. ” He called the Vatican “a small island separated from the rest of the city” but nevertheless said that life in the Vatican now “is very limited” with people closed in their apartments.
“We can also go out in the Vatican Gardens for a walk but always must keep distance from one another to avoid contagions,” he said. The Vatican has followed the decrees of the Italian state, which has restricted movement except to procure essential goods. “I went to the pharmacy for a necessity and before entering they took my temperature,” said Cardinal Francesco Monterisi, 85, who lives in the Vatican. He said that he had no way of getting a haircut, that his watch had stopped because the battery died, and that he couldn’t replace it.
“But we go ahead with trust, we need to hope because the Lord is good, it’s not true that he punishes. ” Pope Benedict XVI, who is 92 and frail, also lives in the Vatican. His longtime personal secretary and confidante, Archbishop Georg Gänswein, said that in the Vatican monastery that is their residence, “we live as if in seclusion.
“No visits from the outside and no going out.”
” He said he and Benedict spent much of the day praying for the infected, for the dead, for the doctors and priests on the front lines and for the end of the pandemic. Their shopping, they said, was done by their “caretaker angels. ” Benedict’s former secretary, Bishop Josef Clemens, 72, also lives behind the Vatican’s walls and said that he worked from home like everyone else he knew and watched the pope’s sermons on live stream. He said he went out for food shopping by Sant’Anna gate, where only a few people were allowed inside at a time.
He said that he rarely saw cardinals waiting in line. “Other people go for the cardinals,” he said. As everywhere else, he said, the survival of those in the Vatican depended on one another, not any external fortress. “It’s not about the Vatican walls,” he said.
“It’s about one’s own behavior. ” In the middle of February, Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan, 87, the president emeritus of the Pontifical Council for Pastoral Assistance to Health Care Workers, returned home after successful treatment for pneumonia in a hospital. He was under strict orders to stay inside his home in the San Callisto Palace, an extraterritorial property of the church in the Trastevere section of Rome. “Since Feb.
11, I haven’t left home,” he said. When he got out of the hospital, he called Pope Francis, who had a cold at the time. “I spoke personally with him on the telephone,” he said. “I asked him if he had this virus and he said, no no, that I don’t have.
” “He wasn’t worried,” he said. But many in the Vatican are worried for the pope, especially since news broke on Wednesday that an Italian priest who lives in Santa Marta, the hotel-style residence that is home to the pope, had tested positive for the virus. Cardinal Peter Turkson, 71, who runs the department for promoting integral human development, met with the Pope on Friday morning as part of a “think tank” for coronavirus issues such as the protection of health care workers, access to health care, inequality and unemployment. The pope received him, he said, in his private library, where there were a “lot of hand sanitizers” but no masks.
Cardinal Turkson said he had understood the pope had been tested twice for the virus, both with negative results. On Friday, he said, the pope talked to the group about how somebody was “discovered to be infected in Santa Marta. ” He added that the issue of Santa Marta was a serious one, because while the 130 rooms were separate from one another, it was nevertheless an enclosed space. “The hallways and the corridors are the same.
You need to pass through corridors to get to elevators. So there is a lot of interconnected life,” he said. The case had resulted in “some measures taken to ensure the pope is safe” as well as testing in the Vatican, where he said a lot of workers came in and out, and where older cardinals lived in apartments. Cardinal Lajolo added that especially after the scare in Santa Marta, the pope no longer ate in the refectory with the other priests.
“They have forced him into isolation because, naturally, he is a person we all care about. ” In his remarks on Friday evening, Francis thanked the doctors, first responders and workers on the front lines and said the pandemic “unmasks” to the faithful how “false and superfluous” the priorities of modern life had become. With a wooden crucifix behind him that had been carried through Rome’s streets in 1522 against the great plague, Francis sought to bolster faith in a world facing anxiety and fear. “From this colonnade that embraces Rome and the whole world, may God’s blessing come down upon you as a consoling embrace,” Francis concluded.
“Lord, may you bless the world, give health to our bodies and comfort our hearts. ” Elisabetta Povoledo contributed from Rome, Emma Bubola from Verona.
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