Good Friday in Rome in Times of Coronavirus

Good Friday in Italy is the one day of the year when the bells do not ring.

This is odd, even if you are not conscious of the bells, because urban life everywhere in Italy is conducted among the pealing of one bell or the other. The noon canon yesterday at the Janiculum, which has been sounding off nearly every day since 1847, sounded close to deafening to those who were in Rome because it did not need to share the stage with the bells of St Peter’s — or the hundreds of other churches across Rome which also ring out at midday.

Rome is always engorged with tourists during Holy Week, which began last Sunday and will conclude tomorrow with Easter.  This year, of course, Rome is surreally empty of everyone save the occasional Roman who is on a quick errand and then scurries home.  The highlight for many Catholic visitors who are in Rome for the Week is the Good Friday Via Crucis in the Colosseum, an evocative, theatrical recreation of the Stations of the Cross, undertaken in the presence of the pope. The event was initiated in the 18th century, lapsed and then was reintroduced in 1964 by Paul VI.  In recent years there has been a social and humanitarian theme to the Via Crucis meditations : last year it was the victims of human trafficking. 

This year the event uniquely occurred in an all-but-empty Piazza San Pietro with the stations around Bernini’s colonnade and at the obelisk at the center of the Square, concluding at the steps leading up to the basilica. The cross was carried by 12 men and women, nine associated with a detention center in Padua (who wrote most of the meditations) as well as a nurse, an internist/researcher and an ER anesthesiologist, all three of whom work in service of those affected by the pandemic. The male nurse was in uniform and the two doctors in white lab coats.