Pope Francis stressed on Wednesday the importance of families and friends making small gestures such as hugs and phone calls during times of isolation in a pandemic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe must rediscover the concrete nature of small things, of making small gestures toward those around us family, friends,\u201d the 83-year-old pontiff told the La Repubblica newspaper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThey are gestures of tenderness, of affection, of compassion, which are nonetheless decisive and important for example, a hot dish, a caress, a hug, a phone call.\u201dItalian rules instruct everyone to keep one metre apart while in public but say nothing about what people can do at home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Argentine-born pope has made no secret of his own discomfort at having to communicate with the world\u2019s 1.3 billion Catholics via livestream.The Vatican\u2019s Saint Peter\u2019s Square has also been sealed off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He complained of feeling like he was sitting in a \u201ccage\u201d this month while delivering his first Sunday Angelus Prayer into a camera instead of out of his Vatican window facing thousands of faithful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Italy was the first country in Europe to be seriously hit by the coronavirus pandemic. Its 2,503 official COVID-19 deaths account for more than half of those reported outside China.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Some of the \u201csocial isolation\u201d measures now being unrolled across the rest of Europe and parts of the United States have been in effect in Italy\u2019s northern epicentre of the virus since last month.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Pope Francis stressed on Wednesday the importance of families and friends making small gestures such as hugs and phone calls during times of isolation in a pandemic. \u201cWe must rediscover the concrete nature of small things, of making small gestures toward those around us family, friends,\u201d the 83-year-old pontiff told the La Repubblica newspaper. \u201cThey […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":81841,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-81840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81840","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=81840"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81840\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":81842,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81840\/revisions\/81842"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/81841"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}