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March 27, 2020 "Almighty and merciful God, look at our painful condition: comfort your children and open our hearts to hope, because we feel your presence as a father among us". So the pope, visibly moved, began the special prayer in an empty square in Saint Peter's Square for this emergency time linked to the coronavirus pandemic.

Pope Francis went up alone to the churchyard of San Pietro, in an empty square, to preside over a one hour prayer moment which, on the occasion of the coronavirus pandemic, and which will end with an extraordinary "urbi et orbi" blessing.

Evening falls, the man is lost and afraid. We are all on the same boat, Pope Francis says in the homily delivered during the extraordinary moment of prayer this evening in St. Peter's Square. "For weeks it seems that evening has fallen. Dense darkness has thickened on our squares, streets and cities; they have seized our lives filling everything with deafening silence and a desolate void, which paralyzes everything in its passage: you feel it in the air, you feel it in your gestures, your eyes say it, "said the Pope." We found ourselves afraid and lost. Like the disciples of the Gospel we were taken aback by an unexpected and furious storm. We made ourselves I'm counting on being on the same boat, all fragile and disoriented, but at the same time important and necessary, all called to row together, all in need of comforting each other. We are all on this boat ".

"As those disciples, who speak with one voice and in anguish say: 'We are lost', so we too have realized that we cannot go on each on our own, but only together", he added.

After sunset, in a Bernini colonnade bathed in rain and illuminated by six braziers placed in the churchyard, the Pope is seated under a white canopy. Near the central gate of the Vatican Basilica are the image of the Salus Populi Romani, the Byzantine icon of the Madonna "salvation of the Roman people" preserved in the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore and invoked by the inhabitants to protect them from the dramas that have marked history of the Eternal City, and the 15th century wooden crucifix preserved in San Marcello al Corso, "miraculously" escaped a fire that destroyed the church in 1519 and then carried in procession in 1522 to invoke the end of a plague that struck Rome. Precisely to invoke the end of the epidemic, the bishop of Rome prayed in front of both these two sacred objects during a sort of "pilgrimage" which he made, on March 15, along, partly on foot, the streets of the city eternal. It was the Pope himself who announced this evening's appointment at the Sunday Angelus on 22 March:

"We will listen to the Word of God, raise our supplication, adore the Blessed Sacrament, with which at the end I will give the Urbi et Orbi Blessing, to which the possibility of receiving the plenary indulgence will be attached". After listening to the Word of God, Pope Francis will give a meditation. The Blessed Sacrament will be exhibited on the altar located in the atrium of the Vatican Basilica and after the supplication, the rite of the Eucharistic blessing "Urbi et Orbi" will follow, to the city and the world, usually given by the Pope every Easter and every Christmas. Then Cardinal Angelo Comastri, Archpriest of St. Peter's Basilica, will pronounce the formula for the proclamation of indulgence.