The pandemic and Pope Francis

By Peter Wolfgang ( bio - articles - email ) | Mar 13, 2025

The pandemic began five years ago today. For me, at least. And by “pandemic,” I really mean the lockdown. I think that is what most of us mean when we talk about that era.

At the close of business on Thursday March 12, 2020 Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont issued “Executive Order #7,” forbidding gatherings of 250 or more people. My organization, Family Institute of Connecticut, huddled with the Connecticut Catholic Conference and the March for Life all the next day and finally, on Friday the 13th, we sent out simultaneous messages cancelling what would have been the first Connecticut March for Life.

It was finally held in 2022 and every subsequent year. Next Wednesday, March 19th at noon at the state capitol in Hartford, will be for the fourth CT March for Life. I hope you will join us.

But back to that day, that era. I can’t recall anything like it. My great-grandmother lived through the Spanish Influenza epidemic of 1918. I think that pandemic was worse but the leadership was better. For the one in our lifetime, much of the pain was induced by unforced errors by our leaders. Closing the schools; forbidding funerals but allowing BLM protests; the loss of trust in our scientific, medical, political, media, and other societal institutions. We still haven’t recovered from it.

We may never recover from it. Things are...different now. In certain respects, different in a good way. The average guy on the street needed to know how bad it is, how corrupted our institutions have become. Now he knows. In my case, while my politics are conservative, my temperament is relatively moderate. I take no special pleasure in knowing that the tinfoil hat crowd turned out to be right about so much. But they did. They are. The ones at whom the conspiracy theorists had pointed the finger for decades exposed themselves. Conspiracy, yes. Theory, no.

Yet for all that, I was never as angry at our own leaders as I was at the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). To this day, I don’t understand why there is not more anger at the ultimate culprits. It’s a staple of political science, or left-leaning political science at least, that governments unite fractious peoples by aiming their anger at an external enemy. I feel like the USA in the 21st century has disproved that theory. Give us jihadists committing mass murder on the American mainland on 9/11 or the CCP accidentally killing a million Americans by letting a virus get out of their lab. It doesn’t matter. Americans would much rather fight each other.

It’s a different world now. In the “land of plenty,” where whatever you need was available at the local store, you didn’t know what a “supply line” was. Now you do. Driving on the roads is more dangerous now. There are fewer cops. Some people in some of our lives were never the same again.

Today is also the twelfth anniversary of Pope Francis’ election. I’m on record agreeing with the late Cardinal Pell’s pseudonymous “Demos” memo. Here, I will only add that I also agree with Vice President JD Vance’s recent speech at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast, in which he praised the striking images of this Holy Father, and in particular of the one of him praying for the world, alone in St. Peter’s Square at the height of the pandemic. I couldn’t find a good photo of that event. So I’m sharing this episode instead, which I think gets to the heart of his pontificate, what is best about it.

I realize the credibility of Pope Francis’ biographer, Austin Ivereigh, is not quite what it was a decade ago. Nevertheless, I thought he nailed something important about Pope Francis in this passage from that biography:

He had neither the swagger of John Paul II nor the erudition of Benedict XVI. But what was fascinating was how, in meeting the crowds, he shifted the focus. With Paul VI, the attention was on the dignitaries he met; with John Paul II, it was inevitably on himself; with Benedict XVI, it was on the text he read. But with Francis the attention went to those he called God’s faithful people. Here was a pope who, when he was among them, made ordinary people the protagonists.

Peter Wolfgang is president of Family Institute of Connecticut Action, a Hartford-based advocacy organization whose mission is to encourage and strengthen the family as the foundation of society. His work has appeared in The Hartford Courant, the Waterbury Republican-American, Crisis Magazine, Columbia Magazine, the National Catholic Register, CatholicVote, Catholic World Report, the Stream and Ethika Politika. He lives in Waterbury, Conn., with his wife and their seven children. The views expressed on Catholic Culture are solely his own. See full bio.

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