Pope Francis in an empty St. Peter’s Square in the dark and rain — for many, it was one of the most memorable images of the early COVID-19 shutdown.
That was five years ago now. The footage of the Pope offered us a chance to stop and reflect on what was happening and what it might mean. There’s no real evidence that we have learned what might have been a helpful lesson from the pandemic: Nothing in life is certain. Other than the fact, of course, that we will all die. We don’t know the hour, as the good book says. The pandemic brought that fact home to all of us and transformed it from an abstraction into palpable reality.
Even people who had already decided they didn’t like Pope Francis for ideological or other reasons seemed to take some comfort from his speeches and Masses during the pandemic. For a little while this year, as he spent over a month hospitalized, it looked like Pope Francis’ last act might be reprimanding the vice president of the United States on immigration. Mercifully, this turned out not to be the case. But at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast late this winter, JD Vance, a Catholic convert, quoted the Pope.
In Republican fashion, he recalled how he stocked up on ammo and rice in response to the uncertainty of March 2020. Vance’s breakfast remarks were off-the-cuff until he took to extensively quoting from Pope Francis, in words that Vance said continue to be important to him.
“For weeks now, it has been evening,” Pope Francis said. We knew all too well what he meant. “Thick darkness has gathered over our squares, our streets and our cities; it has taken over our lives, filling everything with a deafening silence and a distressing void, that stops everything as it passes by; we feel it in the air, we notice in people’s gestures, their glances give them away. We find ourselves afraid and lost.”
Vance continued to quote Francis: “Like the disciples in the Gospel, we were caught off guard by an unexpected, turbulent storm.” “We have realized that we are on the same boat, all of us fragile and disoriented, but at the same time important and needed, all of us called to row together, each of us in need of comforting the other.”
There was a dissonance to what Vance had to say that morning, demonstrating humility and vulnerability, while also trying to make the case that his boss is basically as Catholic as a non-Catholic can get in terms of policy, promoting peace on the world stage.
Vance was in the Oval Office later that same morning, berating Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Was this an administration of peace? Having just returned from Ukraine, commentator Douglas Murray spoke at the National Review Institute Summit in D.C. recounting conversations with parents who sent their kids away to camp for a reprieve from the war, only to have them kidnapped by Vladimir Putin’s forces.
The humility, vulnerability, self-reflection, and togetherness seemed foreign to that painful Oval Office scene. There are serious questions when it comes to Ukraine and the extent of the United States’ involvement, but evil is being perpetrated against Ukrainians, and we shouldn’t ignore it.
Pope Francis has now reached the evening of his own life. He’s been reflecting with us on sickness and suffering.
Not only are we not here forever, it’s also not a given that we will let sickness and suffering bring us closer to God and make us more compassionate toward one another, as they are meant to do.
We should revisit that night in the rain and ask what it means for us today, and what it still has to teach us.
Kathryn Jean Lopez is senior fellow at the National Review Institute, editor-at-large of National Review magazine and author of the new book “A Year With the Mystics: Visionary Wisdom for Daily Living.” She is also chair of Cardinal Dolan’s pro-life commission in New York, and is on the board of the University of Mary. She can be contacted at klopez@nationalreview.com
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