INTERVIEW: Dr Austen Ivereigh on The Pope in Lockdown: Pope Francis’ response to COVID-19

In our fourth CV Connect Webinar we were joined by Dr Austen Ivereigh, one of the leading interpreters of the Francis papacy and a British Catholic writer journalist and commentator. Austen is also one of the founders of Catholic Voices and his bestselling biography is: The Great Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope (2015). His latest book is titled Wounded Shepherd: Pope Francis and His Struggle to Convert the Catholic Church (2019).

CV: The question we’re starting with for all of us speakers is ‘what are the challenges and opportunities for you personally that have been thrown up by all of this coronavirus crisis?’ and obviously one of them is that you've managed to snag an interview with the Holy Father, which is no small feat. What's this time of isolation been like for you?

Austen: I think like most of us I'm at home 24/7. I wasn't actually doing a whole lot before the lockdown, in other words I was mostly at home anyway, so it hasn't in that sense been a massive difference. I fortunately have a few acres here – we've just moved to the country – so it's been lovely to be outside, and actually life was very quiet, almost monastic, until suddenly the Pope decided that he would answer some questions that I had sent him.

I hadn't by this time expected him to do that. We had an exchange – it was about the 20th of March so it was actually about three days before the lockdown that I contacted him. I suggested that he address the English-speaking world, and I suggested that it be through an English-speaking Catholic paper so that the people at home could hear from him directly, thinking about how the crisis was coming now to the English-speaking world. So that was why I reached out to him, and we had this exchange – I've told this story in an article in Thinking Faith – where he really gave me the sense that this wasn't the time, and I said to him don't worry. 

Then he did this remarkable Urbi et Orbi on the 27th of March, and after that I felt he really had done what I was asking him to do, which was to guide us through this crisis. Bbut then suddenly I got a call from his priest-secretary to ask if it would be alright if the Holy Father recorded the answers to the six questions I'd sent him.

I said of course, I'd be delighted – I had no idea how long or how deep his answers were going to go. I was planting a tree at the time – I had promised my wife I'd plant a jasmine – and I just thought I'd listen to it on my earphones. Well, the jasmine was well planted, and watered, and mulched by the time I realised he was only on his second answer, and I realised this was a really extraordinary interview, probably one of the deepest and certainly one of the ones that's come most from his heart and the depths of his discernment, in really his entire pontificate.

That was the context in which I reached out to him and for two or three days after the interview was published my life was really rather different. I did write to him afterwards and say 'Holy Father, I have discovered that having an exclusive papal interview on a major global crisis certainly makes lockdown more interesting.'

CV: Because the Pope's English is not that good, the interview was all in Spanish?

Austen: It was all in Spanish. I sent him the questions in Spanish and he replied in Spanish. His secretary sent me the audio, his audio, which he had recorded, and I then transcribed, translated, and edited in collaboration with a Spanish-speaking journalist in Rome called Juan Vicente Boo, who is the correspondent for ABC in Spain. That's how we did. it

CV: For context, it's probably the first time this was for a UK publication – The Tablet, I'm not sure about Commonweal – and speaking to a British journalist.

Austen: There was some disagreement when we were preparing this, and The Tablet asked if this was actually the first interview Pope Francis had done with an English-speaking media? The answer is no, because he gave one in 2018 to Reuters. Now, Reuters is a news agency, not a publication, therefore this is the first interview the Pope has done with an English-language publication. In fact, he didn't do it with The Tablet: he did it with me, and I offered it to The Tablet and Commonweal simultaneously, but it's certainly the first interview he's ever done with a British journalist, and the first interview with English-speaking Catholic publications.

CV: You were saying that when the Urbi et Orbi happened on 27th March and we had that dramatic scene of him giving Benediction to an empty St Peters, with the miraculous crucifix and with the Marian image from Santa Maria Maggiore, many commentators were saying these would be the iconic images of Francis's papacy. So what was it about that that made you feel it had answered what you were asking?

Austen: Without giving away too much, when I wrote to him, it was really about his leadership at this time, and I felt that we needed guidance, we needed a storm-pilot, and – of course – interestingly he used the image of the storm in his 27th of March Urbi et Orbi.

The image I had in mind, and I did say this to him in the letter, was Exodus, you know, how Moses is leading God's people through the desert through this time of uncertainty and crisis. In a way, great leadership – forget spiritual leadership for a moment – is about seeing the far horizon when all we can see is the present, in other words it's to see beyond the moment, and spiritual leadership is really about being able to identify how God is calling us to be and to change through this.

So the assumption of my writing to him was – and I know this from his own writings particularly on his tribulations, a wonderful word for a time of distress – that he, as a good Jesuit, understands that there is always a grace that is being offered to us in times of suffering and tribulation, and that the grace that God offers is one of conversion. There is always that grace, so in a way the task of discernment is to understand where that call is.

So that was really why i was reaching out to him, and of course in that 27th of March Urbi et Orbi he certainly demonstrated spiritual leadership. I wrote an article afterwards for Commonweal called 'The Pope and the Plague' about this moment which many, many people have been describing as perhaps the iconic moment of his papacy. Who knows, but he certainly looked like Moses, and Moses of course was often a very lonely figure, and here is the Pope, suddenly the Pope of the people without the people, addressing an empty square, capturing the desolation of it in those first few words, but then using the Gospel story of Jesus asleep in the boat to show that there is a future here, that there is something happening here which is being born, and that is a question of course of trusting that process. 

I think the process was clear after that Urbi et Orbi – he saw this as a time of conversion. And I think what my interview did was helped him to spell out, in really quite concrete ways and using literary metaphors – Francis has a great genius for communicating often very deep spiritual ideas in the  language of literature and history and in ordinary language – with very specific examples how the Church need to act now in these changed circumstances, how we who are at home are called to be, how governments need to act, and what kind of society can and should emerge from this crisis. Those are all the issues which, as you know from the interview, were dealt with in a remarkable concrete way.

CV: In answering your first question, the Pope spoke about two ways of reading the situation from the perspective of the Church – as a time of conversion and a time of preparation. Could you perhaps speak a bit more on this?

Austen: So in respect of the stance of the Church and how the Church is called to be in these circumstances, I've already said it's a time of conversion. Now, every time of conversion there are always choices involved, in fact Francis says that very clearly in his Urbi et Orbi – this is a time of choosing.

In times of crisis choices are polarized and clarified; the paths ahead become clear, and there are temptations which take us away from where God is calling us to be. So, my first question was really about the controversy, which we're all very familiar with if we've been following the stories: ‘Should churches stay open? How much risk should priests take in order to minister to people?’ – all those questions which are very, very direct pastoral challenges, which he has been gently addressing from the Vatican

That's what I was really asking him to tease out.

It's interesting that in response to my first question, which was in a very gentle way about how he was experiencing the pandemic, he immediately identifies the temptation of the moment, which is to withdraw. So in a time of fear surrounded by death, with all these regulations that we can't have contact, the temptation is to withdraw, not just physically but in every other sense, spiritually and psychologically to withdraw into ourselves, and there is a specific temptation for the Church which is for pastors to say ‘well I can't pastor at the moment because of these restrictions’.

Now Francis had already mentioned in one of his early comments on the crisis the figure of Don Abbondio in Alessandro Manzoni's novel The Betrothed, from the 19th Century, one of his favourite novels. He's often citing it, and he said we mustn’t be like Don Abbondio. Now, Don Abbondio is the cowardly curé of the story whose response to the plague of 1630 in Milan is to shutter himself up and kind of quote Latin and say ‘I'm for the sacraments.’ And Frances clearly sees that that's the temptation.

And that's why I ended up asking him in the interview about other characters in the novel. We're talking here about the choice which we face as pastors – and while I'm talking about priests we're also necessarily talking about anybody who ministers, anybody who cares about other people – of how much risk should we take. Francis isn't going to get into the weeds of specific situations but he wants you to know in the interview and in other things he's said that the restrictions should not stop us from being who we are called to be, which is to be evangelisers, which is to bring God's hope and consolation to people, particularly those on their own who are suffering who are ill and so on.

In Alessandro Manzoni's novel, the Capuchins run this extraordinary field hospital and of course the Capuchins are the ones who offer the heroic model, they care for the infected, they get infected and die with the infected. That role of course is now being taken by doctors, by nurses, by volunteers, as we all know from the news. So Francis is praising them, and saying they are the model also for the Church.

Obviously he's not saying we ignore precautions. We have to take precautions, we have to be sensible, we mustn't be carriers of the disease. So we have to find creative ways – creative is a word he uses a lot in the interview – of being present to others at this time. This webinar and livestreamed Masses and so on are all examples of course of that pastoral creativity, but the Pope’s message to priests is specifically: don't let this stop you being pastors, this is the time to be out and accompanying people, though obviously in creative ways that respect regulations and don't help spread the disease.

CV: He continues this in his Easter Urbi et Orbi, and picking up that theme of spiritual Temptations, he said this isn't a time for indifference, self-centeredness, division, or forgetfulness. But how do we, considering the temptations that come from being distant from the sacraments and perceived distance from grace, how do we speak into that sense that Christ the spells the darkness of suffering, and also try and be close to people? What are your impressions of what the Pope is saying about how we should avoid those temptations?

Austen: We have one area which is how the church is ministers are called to act, and then there's the more general question, which affects most of us much more directly, which is how are most of us are called to be at this time when we're not stacking supermarket shelves, and we're not ministering in Covid wards. If we're doing those things we don't need to talk about what we should be doing, because those are the heroes of this story!

But what about those of us who are at home, caring for our kids, carrying on working if we have still got work, what are we called to do? This is where I think in the interview he goes really, really deep into the whole question of remembrance. Now, The Tablet quite rightly I think picked this out for a headline: 'Take good care of yourselves for a future that will come'. This process of remembering is extremely important for Francis. He mentions at one point the first week of the spiritual exercises of St Ignatius. In the first week of the four-week retreat you look back over your life, not in a nostalgic way, not to beat yourself up, not to take refuge in the past, but actually to see how you've got to be where you are.

And so, in that process of remembrance we discover, for example, that we've got our priorities wrong, we've invested too much in certain kinds of activity which have proved ultimately fruitless, when we were driven by ambition or pride or insecurity or fear, we see we've trampled on people. On the other hand we also have seen that Jesus was walking with us throughout this time in ways that we weren't even aware of, we had angels with us, so it's a time of looking back and learning from the past, and understanding how we need to change. 

Francis's point about remembering is actually a very sophisticated point, because he saying don't let this – the Covid crisis – become yet another historical anecdote, one that’s been sanitised, as it were. No, let this become a moment of transformation and of change.

The example he gives which I think is really fascinating is he talks about going to take part in the Normandy landings commemoration, and he says it was all about the rebirth of democracy. This key moment in the Second World War where one might say the tide began to turn, and you could see Nazi defeat on the horizon – now you could look back on that and say that was the moment when European democracy was reborn. But what about the 10,000 kids, the boys who died on the beach? What about the massacre? What about the horror? What is that led us to the war in the first place?

For the kind of remembering that he is calling to is a very fruitful kind of remembering, very similar to a sort of examination of conscience. He's saying to us, in terms of our spiritual attitude or our mindset, in our day-to-day mindset now as we are, stuck here at home or wherever, he warns us against two things.

One of them is taking refuge in distraction, in other words, let's watch another Netflix series to take us out of the moment. That's useless, he says, that's frivolous: forget that.

But he also warns us against a kind of desolation or introspection, when we fall into this dark space of saying ‘Who knows what the future will bring? We're powerless.’ That's the darkness, the temptation of the darkness of Covid is to say we just don't know what's going to happen what's the point? And that's of course deeply destructive.

So he is urging us to have a third kind of mindset which is where faith comes into it, because we trust that God is the author of History, that there is a future, that something is being born out of this, and that we need to be part of that thing that's coming that thing that's being born, and we do that by this process of remembering and this process of conversion.

I hope I'm not overanalysing this, because Francis has a very straightforward way of communicating, but I think it's fair to say that embedded in this – when he talks about remembering and he gives these anecdotes – actually implicit in this is a very deep understanding of the grace of conversion and how we can open our minds and hearts to that grace which God is always offering us in times of tribulation. 

CV: One of the things that became really apparent to me in the early days of this was how things in my life which are non-essential are kind of being stripped away, and there's a kind of simplicity. I feel like there's a degree of predictability and a degree of suffering, with different people going through different things. It reminded me – even before I read it in the interview – of Laudato Si', where the Pope talks about this concept of the 'technocratic paradigm' where technology puts us in weird relationships, where people become subservient to systems. So that theme kind of comes up, and without using these terms the Pope speaks about the need to see people and how we shouldn't let particularly the poor and the marginalised be lost from this. So how do you see these connections between isolation and Laudato Si'...?

Austen: I've spoken about being at home and the mindset that we're called to have in this crisis, which enables us to be part of that new future that's being born. Another part of the interview was about the wider social conversion that – as it were – we're being invited to enter into as humanity. His answer to the question where I said I was curious to know if the Pope saw the crisis and the economic devastation it was wreaking as a chance for an ecological conversion – a phrase first used by John Paul II and which Francis has used a lot, for reassessing priorities and lifestyles – and I asked him concretely whether he could in the future foresee an economy that was less liquid and more human, again to use his language.

In answer to this question, though, his voice slowed down, and I just felt this depth, where he was taken by the Spirit, as we would say in charismatic language; it really felt as if he was speaking out of a place of being anointed, as he would put it. He starts off about remembrance, and then he quotes Virgil on how we need to recover our memory because memory will come to our aid, the first week of the Spiritual Exercises, and then he gets into the question of ecological conversion, where he says: 'Today I believe we have to slow down our rate of production and consumption and to learn to understand and contemplate the natural world – we need to reconnect with our real surroundings, this is the opportunity for conversion.’

Now he's quoting Laudato Si' there – he's not saying anything new. In fact, this was quite wrongly picked up by, you know, fake news media as saying 'Pope says that the cause of the coronavirus is ecological devastation'. He never says anything of the sort, and in fact he says very clearly here that this is not the first plague in history.  He hasn't said that coronavirus is the result of our misuse of nature, and by the way there are plenty of reasons why we might think it is – we could talk about wet markets, and the exploitation of nature, but he doesn't go into that.

What he does say, though, is that the economic freezing that's happening at the moment is an opportunity to reassess what really matters in terms of the way we live, how we consume too much and we produce too much, and that has had a massive impact on the environment, and Francis does say that extreme weather events are in response to that. So this is a moment to understand that and to be converted. 

Now the process of conversion in this case – ecological conversion – is very clearly spelled out in Laudato Si', which happens when we reconnect with nature, not just going and hugging a tree or whatever, but when we learn instead of using the natural world around us to come to see it as a gift. That's contemplation: we contemplate the world and we see it as a gift, but actually everything is gift. All is gift, and we have been entrusted with something precious and that's why in Wounded Shepherd I say that the big, ethical joining up of the dots that Francis has done is to say if you care about abortion, you care about the sanctity of unborn life, because life is a gift, it's not simply our possession. The same logic should lead us to despair of the devastation of the rain forest, and vice versa: he challenge to ecologists is to say 'you care about the rain forests; you need to care about unborn life'.

I hope I'm not extrapolating too much, but I think he sees this as the moment where, as it were, the ethical schizophrenia of the western world will kind of come home to roost, and we need to reconnect and contemplate, which will allow us to reassess things. So he talks about early signs of an economy that's less liquid and more human, and I invited him to talk about that. Almost immediately he says 'I see signs' but then he says let's not lose this opportunity when the restrictions are lifted to all race back to our offices, race back to our careers. No, he says, this has to change. 

I want to refer to Francis’ Easter letter to the popular movements. I think here he spells out much better or more clearly what he said to me in the interview, and here's what he says: 'My hope is that governments understand that technocratic paradigms (whether state-centred or market-driven)' – that's to say, a mentality which is essentially functional, which is that the state can solve everything, or the market can solve everything – 'are not enough to address this crisis or the other great problems affecting humanity. Now more than ever, persons, communities and peoples must be put at the centre, united to heal, to care and to share.'

It's become a commonplace of this crisis to say the people who really matter are the nurses and the doctors and the volunteers and the people bringing food and medicines to the elderly – suddenly these are the people who really matter in our lives. Frankly, the celebrities don't matter, we don't care that Meghan has gone to Canada and so on. We're suddenly discovering what matters.

And Francis is very clear there: God is performing kind of a miracle, if we're attentive to it, by understanding that people are at the centre of economy and society, and that the service of others is what really matters. This is the conversion to which we're being called. That is the path ahead which, if we are capable of grasping it, will transform us.

CV: So it's about not wasting this opportunity but leaning into this opportunity, and it's a kind of typical motif of Francis – I was thinking of how he was one of the first world leaders to respond to the migrant crisis, and he did so saying that these are people with faces and names. It's kind of an incarnational way of communicating, as when he says 'I think of people ... what concerns me is people.... thinking of people anoints me, it takes me out of preoccupations'. All of these things in a way are connected, in kind of an ecological way of speaking which is typically Francis. 

Austen: Just on that point, I should have said at the beginning where I'm asking him how he is living this crisis, he says 'I'm praying for people, and I'm attending to their concrete needs, I've stepped up the activities of the office of the papal charities,' and the other thing he says he's doing – and he must be one of the few world leaders who really is doing this – is he's planning for the post-pandemic period, which he says will be painful. But he's got a group from the dicastery for human development in the Vatican, who are basically really, really looking at this: what's going to happen after this?

It's interesting isn't it – he responds to my question with a series of actions: he's praying more; he's praying for people; he's attending to concrete needs; he's planning. Don't give in to the desolation of your moment, but rather act against that desolation with concrete actions that look towards the future. 

CV: Thanks for spelling that out, because that's a concrete take-away for us, how can we learn from Francis's example, taking concrete action and being less preoccupied by focusing on the other and planning for beyond the aftermath. So, thinking about the future, and how Pope Francis can help us to navigate that, he talks a bit about responding to confinement with creativity, and points towards the Acts of the Apostles and new ways of thinking. Can you speak in to that?

Austen: Yes, I mean specifically about the Church, because I think I talked about how we are called to be at home. I asked him a question about the Church and I phrased it rather clumsily, because I talked about a home church – which isn't, by the way, a domestic church, which is a metaphor for family, and I think we need another kind of metaphor for what we're doing at the moment, where I'm at Mass every morning with the Pope at Santa Marta on my iPad, or we're at Sunday Mass in the sitting room with our dogs and our children. This is what I call 'home church' and it's a new kind of way of living our ecclesial life as a people of God.

The Archbishop of Canterbury said recently that what all this is really bringing home is that we are firstly the people of God, and the institution is what follows from that. That was kind of what I was thinking, but of course Francis immediately says to me, look, there's no dichotomy between the people of God and the institution, because we are always becoming institutions, because God enters the story of humanity in Jesus Christ in such a way as to form his people into a body. That is institutionalisation:in other words it means action, it means meeting, it means creating bodies and organisations and groups which do things which perform God's mercy and help to bring God's consolation to a hurting world.

The concreteness of the Church is very important to him. We are an institution and we are now in this crisis still an institution, but we are being remade. He says it's the Holy Spirit that institutionalises the Church, and because it's the Holy Spirit, two things: one, it's always ahead of us, it's always in front and we're always catching up, and two, there are things which, when the Holy Spirit is in charge, we're being called to let go of and other things we're called to take on.

I think that right now, there's a great article to be written about how churches did Easter. I'm sure in this webinar we've all got great stories, some of them I'm sure stories of disaster and so on, but we're fumbling our way. There is something about the simultaneity, which is why I was glad that you said in this ‘CV connect’ that we are present to each other right now, in a very different way through this. The sacramentality of the Church is very important: it's not confined to materiality, which is why some of the discussions among Catholics about the lack of access to sacraments miss how we are finding other ways to be sacramentally present to each other.

Now of course when the restrictions are lifted and we're able to gather again we will – we are a gathered community, we're of course called to be gathered and to be present to each other – but will we have learnt something from this time about how we can be better present to each other when we're not physically with each other on Sunday? I think that's the kind of thing he's getting at here: have we as a Church really made use of these extraordinary technologies – Zoom, Skype, webinars and so on – to minister to humanity?

This is all me, not the Pope, but he's saying be open to the new stuff that the Holy Spirit is bringing us through this crisis, rather than simply sitting around complaining about our weak-willed bishops because they've closed the churches; no, our bishops have done the right thing by closing the churches and our bishops are confident that the sacramentality and the sacramental life of the Church continues in other – perhaps unexpected – ways, which will bear fruit in the future. 

CV: For Catholic Voices when we've done things before where we've spoken about Pope Francis and his vision for the Church, we often speak about the Aparecida Document, which is kind of a precursor for Evangelii Gaudium, speaking about how the church reacts to modernity and about the kind of liquidity that involves the severing in modernity of family and traditional institutions and is a form of self-isolation.

What I've noticed in my life, because I live in the world and am affected by it, is that even how I live my faith is compartmentalised and clericalised. My first instinct – and it's a good instinct – is to want to livestream and have that there, but as Holy Week was happening I saw people saying 'Don't just leave it to the livestream; if you're a husband, wash your wife's feet, and she can wash your feet, renew your own baptismal promises,' and it's kind of challenged me. I want the sacraments, and I miss them – there's a thirst there – but thinking about this kind of connected thinking there are certainly lessons to be learned. Have we been put into isolation to teach us how not to be in it in a certain sense?

Austen: That's beautifully put. I love the anecdote about washing your wife's feet – it hadn't even occurred to me! And aren't we tempted, when Mass is on the iPad and the homily isn't great, are we tempted to do a split-screen and see what's going on on Twitter? In other words, the same distractions which frankly are there with us in church are perhaps even more live to us now. As Francis said in the 27th of March Urbi et Orbi, this is a time of choosing, and a time of things becoming clear, so the openness is important. Again, it's about not wasting this crisis. Don't let this crisis find us at the end of it how we were before it. We must have been changed in some way by it. 

And of course, I think all this should be a lot easier for Christians than others to understand because we have the concept of Lent. You know, Lent is itself a kind of a lockdown where we are deprived of things, where we turn in on ourselves, where we embrace our interiority, where we are open to new things, where we try and cut out the things that are harmful to us. So we should be right now bringers of hope in the context of Corona because we say 'Guys, this is Lent, we get this: it's a purgation. We do this every year – well, not quite like this, but, still, how can we help?' 

I think, again, this is purely me, but when we look back on events like the famous Spanish flu of 1918, or indeed the world wars or really any experience like this, they do usually lead to a revival in spirituality and in churchgoing because people have encountered the things that matter: death, deprivation, and so on. Some things have become more important and other things have faded in importance in this context, which is in a way what Lent tries to do. Lent tries to highlight what's really important and to highlight the distractions and things that are not important so we can let go of them. And that's what this crisis is really doing to the whole world.

Just to get back to the Church, you talked about the bonds of belonging: what are the bonds of belonging within the Church? What brings us to Church every Sunday? How are we part of it, and how are we present to the rest of the Body of Christ?

These are very difficult questions, and we are still living in an age of post-Christendom where many of us were brought up in the habit of churchgoing and massgoing, our parents did it, but all that is going. You're quite right to refer to Francis's own diagnosis of modernity, which I've talked and written lots about, which comes from the great meeting of the Latin American bishops in 2007 at Aparecida in Brazil. There they had this great diagnosis of modernity which is that the institutions are vanishing, the bonds of belonging are being frayed, technology, mobility, globalisation, all these things are causing the institutions to become distant from people, and people just belong less.

There was no great insight in that – all the sociologists agree that this has been happening now for some time, but the genius of Aparecida was to say how does the Church to evangelize in this new context. And the answer is – very simply, and I am simplifying massively – that we can no longer evangelize by relying on Catholic structures like the parish, schools, or charities, the great institutions of the Catholic Church. Forget it – they're all vanishing. They'll continue but people won't belong to them in the same way. We won't trust them in the same way.

And therefore, we are entering into a period which is much more like the early Church. And in the early Church what helped to transmit the Faith was not powerful institutions and the support of law and culture, but rather the opposite, where we are signs of contradiction. But the Faith spreads by the sheer power of testimony and concrete demonstrations of God's tenderness, closeness, and love of humanity. That's what astonished the early pagan world.

That's what happening now, when people see these doctors who haven't got proper PPE, as they go into work every day, and they could die. Why do they do that? And you can see people admiring them, they're all clapping the NHS because we know that they're doing something extraordinary. In a secular society it's often very difficult to connect these dots, but all I'm saying is that the Church needs to be present in wholly new ways to humanity, because humanity is wakening through this crisis to the things that matter.

In our own lives our own religious conversion happens when we become powerless, when we realise that the things we've relied on no longer work and that causes us to look deeper and to turn to God. So that is the moment that I think we're living in and I think that's why these new forms of being present to each other, that we're learning in this crisis, could well be extremely powerful tools for evangelisation post crisis.

On creativity, the Pope is saying we need to be creative, not distracted, not introspective. Creativity is how we cooperate with the Holy Spirit and the graces that are on offer at this time. What is creativity? Creativity is thinking, 'I used to go from A to B that way, I can't anymore, are there other ways I can go from A to B?' We're saying this is important, we need to do this; we can't do it the old way so how can we do it a new way?’

And we experiment. Creativity means making mistakes, it means learning from those mistakes, it means trying new stuff and seeing what works. That's what the Pope means by creativity, and that requires a certain spirit of daring: creativity is incompatible with a timorous spirit where you try to cling on to things which you fear are being taken from you. It's not obviously throwing everything out, and so on, because the Church is a deeply traditional place and tradition matters: tradition is what we hand on, but we need to always find ways of doing this in new, creative ways. I think that's what Francis is getting at there with creativity.

Now he gave the example of a bishop who reaches out to him because of the crisis, and the bishop wants to bring absolution to his Covid patients but can't go inside the ward. He wants to give absolution from the hospital corridor, but the canon lawyers say 'no, you can't', and they're right, because there needs to be in canon law direct personal contact for absolution, so the letter of the law says that. The bishop reaches out to the Pope, and the Pope says 'do your priestly duty'.

Now the Pope isn't telling him what to do; he's saying 'do your priestly duty'. What is your priestly duty? Your priestly duty is to bring absolution, to bring God's consolation, but you can't do it from inside the ward, so you work it out. And the Pope went on to say he then heard he was giving absolution all around the place, and the Pope says that approvingly: it's the middle of an epidemic, you find ways of doing those things which in other circumstances fear or fear of people taking advantage would predominate. So regulations which may apply in normal times we have to be creative in their application in missionary contexts or contexts of emergency like now. I think we can learn a lot from the Pope's anecdote about the bishop, and he says, by the way, that canon law is important, but don't let's be constrained by it: God calls us to be present to humanity at this time. 

CV: What is the Pope's message to the vulnerable, the marginalised, and those who are self-isolating? What is it the Pope predominantly wants to say?

Austen: Well you know I ended the interview with this: I said do you have any message specifically, and identified the elderly who were self isolating, young people who were confined, and those facing poverty as a result of the crisis. And it's quite interesting that Francis gives a meditation which is about how the elderly and the young need each other, but what's really interesting is that he began by saying we speak now of the isolated elderly but that the elderly were also isolated before the crisis.

He tells the story of going to an old people's home in Buenos Aires and people say 'Oh yes, the family come and visit us all the time,’ and a nurse says, 'Nonsense, they haven't been in six months.’ It's a tragedy, and of course we're seeing it now with stories about elderly in care homes – it's appalling that so many people there are dying now. What the crisis is highlighting is how much the elderly have been set apart from society. Now they're forced to self-isolate, and that is a moment for an examination of conscience: why are the elderly on their own? Why are they in homes? How do we reabsorb them into society? 

And again with the young people, Francis has always had this intuition that the young and the old need to connect. He quotes Joel, and says the really fruitful place is when the dreams of the old and the dreams of the young connect and meet. That's what we're called at this time to do: to think about ways of reconnecting those.

So again, as a society that emerges from this crisis, will we be a society in which the middle-aged, strong, hard-working – that mentality and that person, who is really dominant in our society to the point where we don't really have a role for the elderly and the young because they're not productive in the same way, continues to dominate? Again, the call is to reverse that, to say look at the elderly, listen to them, hear what they're inviting us to do, and again the young, how can we bring them into contact with each other and how can we begin to de-centre ourselves so that they become much more in the centre. That's part of the transformation that he talks about. 

Again, it's worth reading his letter to the popular movements: it's very, very beautiful and says it's a time for listening to the margins and those people who've been ignored, allowing them to be the architects of the new society.

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