Pope Francis, JD Vance, and the Evening Rain

P ope Francis in an empty St. Peter’s Square in the dark and rain. For many — obviously, especially Catholics — this was one of the most memorable moments of the early Covid-19 shutdown. All of our shared moments were happening on-screen. Our office meetings. Our desperate catch-up sessions with friends. Our listening to Dr. Anthony Fauci in Washington, D.C., or Andrew Cuomo in New York. People weren’t allowed to say goodbye to loved ones as they died. Women were giving birth in masks, their husbands not allowed to be present. We felt that the world had either gone crazy or tyrannical or both, or that it was the beginning of the end. And during that mess of uncertainty that had rattled most of us, a religious leader led us in prayer.

It was five years ago now. Even people who don’t pray had noticed the event. And, as you may remember, the only sounds we could hear besides the rain were sirens. Emergency vehicles strike me as parts of the essential soundtrack of Rome — akin to the f-word on the streets of New York. You can forget for a moment where you are until these signature reverberations bring you back to reality. For a native New Yorker, or a Christian in Rome, sirens may signal “home.” That scene on our screens brought many of us to our knees. (Truth be told, as Masses and worship services were available only online, we were starting to become more accustomed to praying by our laptops with coffee in hand.)

Rain can be cathartic, meditative, and refreshing. Maybe especially when the darker clouds roll in. That Friday evening gave those of us here in the U.S. permission to stop and reflect on what on earth was happening. There’s no real evidence that we took what might have been the most helpful lesson from the pandemic: that nothing in life is certain — other than death, of course. We don’t know the hour, as the Good Book says, but was it coming sooner than we realized? We began to be alarmed by every cough and sniffle, and we began to see others as living vessels of deadly disease. Little did we know — severe cases and long Covid aside — that most of us would have a relatively mild version of the thing, and many of us multiple times, and live to remember and even to commute back to our offices.

Even people who had already decided that they didn’t like Pope Francis for ideological or other reasons seemed to take some comfort in his appearance at that square of the world. One recent odd morning in Washington, D.C., was a reminder. As he spent over a month earlier this year hospitalized, it looked as though Pope Francis’s last act might have been reprimanding the vice president of the United States on immigration. Mercifully that proved not to be the case. And at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast last month, JD Vance, a Catholic convert, quoted the words the pontiff had spoken that night five years ago in Rome.

Vance was a new father at the time. In Republican fashion, he recalled how he had stocked up on ammo — and rice — in response to the uncertainty of March 2020. Vance’s remarks were off-the-cuff until he took to extensively quoting words that, Vance said, continue to be important to him.

“For weeks now it has been evening,” Pope Francis had said in St. Peter’s Square. 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. Like the disciples in the Gospel we were caught off guard by an unexpected, turbulent storm.”

Vance continued to quote Francis:

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. On this boat . . . are all of us. Just like those disciples, who spoke anxiously with one voice, saying ‘We are perishing,’ so we too have realized that we cannot go on thinking of ourselves, but only together can we do this.

And yet there was a dissonance in what Vance had to say that morning: he demonstrated humility, and even vulnerability, while trying to make the case that his boss is a man of peace and as Catholic as a non-Catholic can be in terms of policy. Most journalists who attended the breakfast could not file a write-up of what the vice president had said before Vance was back in the Oval Office berating Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky. Is this the administration of peace? As the cherry blossoms were beginning to bloom in D.C. earlier this month, commentator Douglas Murray, who had just returned from Ukraine, spoke at the National Review Institute’s Ideas Summit. He recounted conversations with parents who had sent their kids away to camp for a reprieve from the war only to have them kidnapped by Vladimir Putin’s forces. Humility, vulnerability, self-reflection, and togetherness seemed foreign to that Oval Office scene that we painfully watched. There are prudential questions about U.S. involvement in Ukraine, but it’s clear that evil is being perpetrated against that country.

Pope Francis, five years after that memorable evening in St. Peter’s Square, seems to be in the evening of his own life. He has been reflecting with us on sickness and suffering. We are not here forever, and it is not certain that we will let our travails make us better and more compassionate or bring us closer to God. We recriminate well, but could we also, during our spring cleaning, go back to that night in the rain, ask what its lessons might mean for us today — knowing what we, older and wiser, know now — and pray?

This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.