Coronavirus: Easter in Bergamo where "we feel the weight of death"

Mgr Giulio Dellavite, secretary general of the Curia of Bergamo, here on March 25, 2020. MIGUEL MEDINA / AFP

Text by: Pauline Gleize

The Passover celebrations for the Jews and Easter for the Christians take place this year in exceptional circumstances. This is particularly the case in Bergamo, in the north of Italy, a city particularly bruised by the Covid-19. Testimony of Monsignor Giulio Dellavite, secretary general of the diocesan curia of Bergamo.

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RFI: How is Easter organized this year in Bergamo? Did you want the churches to open?

Archbishop Giulio Dellavite: No, because opening the churches would not be beneficial for people at this time. In Bergamo, each parish will celebrate Easter services behind closed doors. Only the priests are in the churches and the faithful follow at home. Almost all the churches of the diocese have organized to broadcast the celebration by streaming on YouTube, Facebook or other. In this way, the faithful at home can follow their priest. The bishop officiates live on television.

Do Easter celebrations have a special meaning this year?

On every Easter holiday so far, a believer has spoken, prayed, and grasped the symbol of the desert because the concept of Easter is a Jewish concept of the transition from slavery to freedom, from the transition from desert to the Promised Land. What Jesus followed, on the occasion of the Jewish Passover, achieved with the passage from death to life. And every year, we symbolically said that we were in the desert. The peculiarity of this Passover 2020 is that we are really in the desert, we are crossing it. We are living through what the past years we symbolically evoked. So it's a living, concrete experience of Easter.

Churches are closed, life habits disrupted. Do you notice more or less need for religious practice?

Again, this is a special Passover. There is a real need for spirituality. With us, we feel the weight of death enormously. Death has claimed so many people here. And in addition, this death has a dimension of disappearance. People disappeared in the sense that a loved one was taken to the hospital and if he died, you never saw him again. At the hospital, he was immediately put in a coffin. If you were in quarantine, you couldn't even participate in his burial. The fact that there is no more funeral is even worse. So death had a very big impact on people's lives and on so many families. Many people have lost friends, relatives, acquaintances these days. This weight of death leads even more to seek a meaning, a hope ... and therefore a resurrection.

What is still allowed at the time of death? Is extreme anointing still allowed?

No, nothing is allowed anymore. The only thing a priest can do is at the time of burial. When a coffin is buried or ashes which return are put in a funerary monument, the priest can give a blessing with the family. If it is there! Because very often, even children, parents, husband or wife cannot be present because they are locked up in their homes for quarantine. And so there can really be only the priest and a family member, when possible, who gives the blessing to the deceased when he is buried.

How do you live this period?

It was an intense period. A period when so many things, values, structures are questioned, rethought. A time of very intense dialogue with people. Paradoxically, the isolation created more proximity, more bond between people, more dialogue, more attention to others. How many people have gone beyond years of silence, arguments, just calling to find out how a loved one was? At the beginning, there was a surge of solidarity and then the solidity of human relationships developed because everyone was locked up at home without having to do anything, did his introspection and looked for what was most important, the most true, the most essential and sought to recover certain relationships.

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