A Jesuit reflects on coronavirus quarantine in Milan

In early March, Patrick Gilger, S.J., boarded a plane in New York en route to Milan. He was on a research trip and going to study Italian in the historic cosmopolitan city located in Italy’s northern Lombardy region. The cross-Atlantic flight had only 12 passengers on it.

When he arrived, the city had just been shuttered. Italy was on the verge of a brutal month of suffering and death at the hands of Covid-19. Outside of his window, in the otherwise empty piazza below, a group of teenagers sat casually, drinking and singing.

“It feels different here,” he wrote in America, “It is as if Milan, under quarantine, has asked me to renounce the particular version of our American response to fear that I have made my own: the unceasing effort to control, to master, to define and thereby dictate what is really real and truly true. And thereby be secure.”

In this bonus episode, “Father Paddy” as he’s known on the popular YouTube series “Jesuit Autocomplete,” reflects on his experience living in an epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic, the humiliations (and humility!) that come with learning a new language and how his isolation has connected him to God and others.

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