The blood of San Gennaro melts at 10.02. The prodigy is greeted, as usual, by the waving of a white handkerchief by the Deputation. “The blood – added the cardinal – is completely dissolved: a sign of love, of goodness, of God’s mercy and of the closeness, of the friendship of our San Gennaro”.
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Sepe cannot fail to start from the great virus emergency, “health but also socio-economic”. And the cardinal gives a voice from the altar to how many faithful think: “In this worrying picture, San Gennaro was not there to look. And as patron and protector of the city and of the whole region he listened to the invocations and prayers of those who turned to him ”.
On the altar the institutional parterre is very spaced but as always dense: the mayor de Magistris, the governor De Luca, among them the deputy head of the Deputation of San Gennaro Riccardo d’Andria Carafa, the deputy of Iv Gennaro Migliore, as well as the prefect of Naples Marco Valentini, at the top of the judicial district and the police. The turnover in the Curia is being prepared.
And the cardinal, who ideally greets the city with this miracle in the fullness of its magisterium – the extension is also at the end, following the expiry of his mandate – immediately invokes the protection “of the patron, and of the Lord Jesus Christ, against the threat of coronavirus on the city and on the Neapolitans “.
At the announcement of the miracle, the applause of a few hundred faithful present in the aisles, but to anyone who has experienced it, even as a visitor, the difference stands out with the image of the crowd, and of the gatherings from the early hours of the morning in honor of the saint. Scenes replaced by a rigorous sequence of filters, for temperature sampling and distancing, not only in the cathedral but throughout the external area of via Duomo and the adjacent pedestrianized streets.
The applause is heard in the Cathedral at the waving of the white handkerchief by Vice President Carafa, but it is as if the echo of what is not heard this year explode, inside and outside the temple.
An atypical San Gennaro ceremony is taking place in the Cathedral. The necessary anti-Covid measures provide that access to the cathedral church is allowed to only 200 people in the Duomo, 100 in the basilica of Santa Restituta (which is located inside the Duomo itself) and 300 in the churchyard where the chairs with relative spacing.
Access prohibited in the stretch of road close to Piazza del Duomo, with police and civil defense to deal with filtering for access only to authorized persons and temperature measurement. Even if in a minor tone, the expectation for the “miracle” of blood liquefaction remains great.
Inside the Chapel of San Gennaro access was allowed to the “relatives”, a group of faithful who every year chant prayers to “incite” the saint to perform the miracle.
That of 19 September, the feast day of the patron saint of Naples, is the main of the three prodigies of the liquefaction of the blood of San Gennaro expected every year. The other two dates on which the miracle is expected are the Saturday preceding the first Sunday in May, when the ceremony takes place in the Basilica of Santa Chiara, at the end of the so-called “infrascati” procession. Then there is December 16, in the Chapel of the Treasury of San Gennaro.
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