The pontiff urges the world to see the coronavirus pandemic as a test of solidarity and a reminder of basic values.

Pope Francis has held a dramatic, solitary prayer service in St Peter’s Square of the Vatican, urging the world to see the coronavirus pandemic as a test of solidarity and a reminder of basic values.

Speaking into an eerily empty square before delivering an extraordinary “Urbi et Orbi” (to the city and the world) blessing, the pontiff said on Friday that the health crisis put everyone “in the same boat”.

“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 find ourselves afraid and lost,” he said.

The Vatican called the service “An Extraordinary Prayer in the Time of Pandemic”, a sombre echo of an announcement by Italian officials minutes earlier that the coronavirus death toll in the country had surged past 9,000.

Francis walked alone in the rain to a white canopy on the steps of the basilica and spoke sitting alone before a square where he normally draws tens of thousands of people, but which is now closed because of the pandemic.

Pope Francis delivered an extraordinary ‘Urbi et Orbi’ (to the city and the world) blessing – normally given only at Christmas and Easter – from an empty St Peter’s Square on Friday. The cardinal responsible for Rome has now been diagnosed with COVID-19 [Yara Nardi/Pool via Reuters]

“We have realised that we are in 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,” he said.

Francis said the virus had exposed people’s vulnerability “to those false and superfluous certainties around which we have constructed our daily schedules”.

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He praised doctors, nurses, supermarket employees, cleaners, caregivers, transport workers, police and volunteers, saying they, and not the world’s rich and famous, were “writing the decisive events of our time”.

The leader of the world’s 1.3 billion Roman Catholics said God was asking everyone to “reawaken and put into practice that solidarity and hope capable of giving strength, support and meaning to these hours when everything seems to be floundering”.

He prayed before a wooden crucifix which is normally kept in a Rome church and brought to the Vatican for the special service.

According to tradition, a plague that hit Rome in 1522 began subsiding after the crucifix was taken around the streets of the Italian capital for 16 days in 1522.