Pope Francis: Coronavirus pandemic showed the best of each

VATICAN CITY (06/22/20) - During the darkest and deadliest days of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic in northern Italy, medical professionals and volunteers were "silent artisans of a culture of closeness and tenderness," a culture that cannot be allowed to disappear, said Pope Francis.

On June 20, in one of his first large group meetings since the pandemic hit Italy in late February, Pope Francis welcomed Vatican doctors, nurses, paramedics, civil defense volunteers, priests, bishops and civil servants from the Italian region of Lombardy.

The coronavirus hit the region much harder than any other area of Italy; as of June 21, about 93,000 of the region´s residents had contracted the virus and 16,570 of them had died. Italy as a whole has had some 238,500 cases of VID-19 and 34,630 deaths.

Pope Francis: Health personnel: patients saw them as angels.

Most Italians, had faced the pandemic with generosity and commitment, but the medical staff really opened the way, becoming safe reference points for the sick and their families who could not visit them.

The sick found in you, health workers, almost family members, able to unite professional competence with the kind of care that includes concrete expressions of love. Patients often felt as if they had angels at their side, helping them to regain their health and, at the same time, comforting and supporting them and, at times, accompanying them to the threshold of their final encounter with the Lord.

Now is the time to treasure all this positive energy that was invested. It can and must bear fruit for the present and the future.

To honour the sacrifices, suffering and death, people must commit themselves to continue the witness of generous and gratuitous love, which has left an indelible mark on consciences and on the fabric of society, teaching how much there is need for closeness, care and sacrifice in order to increase fraternity and civil coexistence.

We can come out of this crisis spiritually and morally much stronger, that will depend on the conscience and responsibility of each one of us. But not alone, but together and with the grace of God.

God created us for communion, for fraternity, and now more than ever it has been shown how illusory the claim to count only on oneself is, is illusory, and to make individualism the guiding principle of society.

People must be vigilant while the pandemic slows down because it is easy to slip, it is easy to fall back into this illusion. It is easy to forget that all people need each other.

Pope Francis: There were priests who acted as fathers and others as teenagers.

Even though during the confinement people could not attend Mass in person, they still felt part of a community. They prayed alone or with their families, even through the media, united spiritually and perceiving the Lord´s embrace.

Many priests showed pastoral zeal in obeying the rules and regulations established by government officials to safeguard the health of the people, while finding ways to reach out to their parishioners, phone the sick and lonely, feed the poor and help those who could not leave their homes.

Their attention defeated a few adolescent expressions, against the measures of the authorities (referring apparently to priests who complained or even publicly challenged the ban on Masses with the faithful present, which ended on May 18), and measures such as requiring masks for those attending Mass once the confinement was reduced.

The priests who did what they could, obeying the safety precautions, were actually parents, not teenagers.

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