SOCIAL DISTANCING, VATICAN STYLE, GOD'S JUDGMENT

Yes, this is true - I saw it live online

Holy Week is past and we are now headed for Emmaus.  This has been the most spiritually nourishing Holy Week I have experienced since I left Rome in 1965.  I have spent many hours with my Vulgate, my laptop and The Voice from the Kitchen.  It has been years since I lived in a Latin world.  At some moments it felt as if I had died and gone to heaven.  The "In paradiso" is still ringing in my ears and I am still humming the tune of the "Evangelium secundum Joannem". 
Oh, about that.  Remember the reflections about the questions that appear in Sacred Scriptures?  I shivered when I heard the famous question, "Quem quaeritis?" 
Then, the reply, "Jesus Nazarenus."
So then the Garden of Gethsemane becomes the Burning Bush, "Ego Sum."
I could go on, but I want to make a point about Easter Sunday.
I am sure that you all have come to the conclusion that the Pope's Easter Sunday Homily was a powerful moment of total silence from the Cathedra (his chair) - a loonng moment.  He then arose, went to the altar and intoned the Credo.  He delivered his Easter instruction after the Mass and before gifting the City and the World with his blessing.
There is one powerful lesson that I have taken away from Our Holy Father's instruction.  It is a lesson that I will never forget.  Not in the context of our Scripture nor in the context of our Tradition.  I am placing it here for your consideration.  I hope it touches you as deeply as it does me.
   "It's time to see the poor man" and not let him simply be part of the landscape. "Seeing the poor - he said - means giving them humanity back. They are not things, they are not waste, they are people. We cannot do a welfare policy as with abandoned animals ".

The pope in his long and varied lessons put a final point on it when he overturned traditional and centuries old teachings when he said, in reference to the pandemic,
"The plague that looms is not a divine punishment. It is not the time of the judgment of God, but of our judgment: the time to choose what matters and what passes, to separate what is necessary from what is not. It's time to reset the course. "

I invite you all to join me in meditation about that directive from St. Peter's Chair.