The Diocese of Rome has closed all Catholic churches across the city and exempted Roman Catholics from attending Sunday Mass because of the coronavirus.
Cardinal Angelo De Donatis, who is in charge of the diocese, announced Thursday that all churches in his jurisdiction would be closed by April 3. This is the first time in history all the Catholic churches in Rome have been closed to worshipers, according to CNN.
The church is obligated to shut down the churches because of a “sense of belonging to a human family exposed to a virus of which we still don’t know the nature of or how it propagates,” De Donatis said in a statement. “The faithful are therefore dispensed from the obligation of fulfilling Sunday celebration.”
“We are living in a very serious health situation each one of us is asked to have the utmost attention, because any imprudence in observing health measures could harm other people,” he added.
Pope Francis livestreamed Sunday’s Mass and did not appear in the window of the Apostolic Palace overlooking St. Peter’s Square for a general audience, as is customary. The pope livestreamed the service and Wednesday’s general audience to stop crowds from gathering in St. Peter’s Square and potentially spreading the coronavirus.
Italy is one of the hardest-hit countries by the coronavirus outside of China, where the virus originated. By Thursday morning, Italy reported more than 12,000 confirmed cases of the virus and more than 800 deaths, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte announced an emergency lockdown of Italy’s northern region of Lombardy last week, affecting roughly a third of the country’s population. The prime minister then extended the lockdown to encompass all of Italy as the country’s hospitals struggle to make room for an influx of patients with COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.
Italy has put out a request for medical aid to its fellow European Union members. Italy’s permanent representative to the EU, Maurizio Massari, slammed the EU’s response to the request on Tuesday, claiming that not a single EU country had come to Italy’s aid.
