"The complexity of what we had to face did not tolerate recipes or textbook answers", "the pain of our people hurt us, its uncertainties struck us, our common fragility stripped us of any false idealistic or spiritualistic complacency, as well as of every attempt at Puritan flight. Nobody is extraneous to everything that happens. We can say that we lived the hour of the Lord's weeping in community ". This is what Pope Francis writes in a letter to the Roman priests.
The Pope wrote a letter to the priests of Rome and thanked them because in this time of pandemic, although "drenched by the storm", they remained close to the people. "We all listened to the numbers and percentages that assailed us day after day - the Pope wrote - we touched the pain of our people with our hands. What came was not distant: the statistics had names, faces, shared stories. Presbyterial community we were not strangers to this reality and we were not looking at it at the window; drenched by the storm that raged - Pope Francis underlines - you have made efforts to be present and accompany your communities: you have seen the wolf coming and you are not have fled nor have you left the flock. "
"The pandemic knows no adjectives, no borders and no one can think of getting away with it alone. We are all affected and involved," wrote the Pope.
Pope Francis went to the Grotto of Lourdes in the Vatican Gardens. Upon his arrival he laid a bouquet of flowers at the foot of the Madonna. Here the rosary worldwide, and in connection with hundreds of shrines in the world to ask for an end to the pandemic. Beside him, in prayer, people representing the categories who in the past few weeks have been at the forefront of the fight against coronavirus, from doctors to nurses, from civil protection to volunteers, from people who have been cured to a family that has seen the birth of a boy, Jacopo.
"Under your protection we seek refuge, Holy Mother of God. Do not despise the pleas of us who are in trial, and free us from all dangers": thus Pope Francis began the Rosary prayer in the Vatican Gardens to ask for an end to the pandemic.