Fr Fabio Attard, a Maltese priest who lives in Rome, describes the situation in Italy as ‘surreal’, saying that uncertainty looms across the nation, yet there are lessons to take from this experience, he believes.  

Fr Attard is a Salesian – a member of the Society of St. Francis de Sales, which is a congregation that engages chiefly in missionary and educational work – who is currently residing in Rome, Italy. He is well-known for the work he has contributed to the Salesian community in Malta and abroad. The Malta Independent spoke with him in order to get a glimpse into the life of a Maltese person in Italy during the pandemic.

“I have been living in Rome for a number of years. The situation, especially in the last 12 or 13 months, has been surreal. The situation here is always changing, there is a sense of fluidity; everyone expects something new every day,” he remarked.

“I was in Turin up until the middle of March, where we were going to hold an international meeting but had to cancel 3 weeks before it commenced. I went back to Rome where there was a total lockdown up until the first weekend of May.”

Fr. Attard spoke about just how much the first few months of the pandemic surprised everyone – especially in Italy, given that it had the first major outbreak of Covid-19 in the whole of Europe.

“The first impact surprised us – we weren't expecting it. Then things calmed down, but at the end of August—beginning of September, things changed for the worse again,” he said. 

Fr Attard recalled that because we were hearing about the pandemic everyday it seemed as if we had become impervious to the way it changed our lives; it was now starting to be seen as the ‘new normal’.    

“Since the news was flooding us with issues surrounding Covid-19 day in day out, it seemed as if we had become anesthetised to the situation. However, it appears as if the situation right now is worse than it was back in the famous weeks of March and April.”

He also said that in Rome, things are relatively less critical than they are in the north-east of Italy.

“The situation in Rome is not as critical as much as it is in Milan and Veneto – the north-east of Italy. In the first period, they seemed to control it, but now they are not managing to,” he noted. 

Regarding how the pandemic has affected his own life, due to the state of the world and Europe right now, he said that he decided to opt against coming down to Malta for the festive holidays as he usually does.

“I usually come down to Malta during the Christmas festivities but decided against it this time.” 

Even in terms of his ecclesiastical work, he did remark that, as like much of the rest of the world, “a lot of work is being shown online.”

“I had a lot of meetings at a European level due to the work that I have right now, as I was supposed to travel to all the European countries but of course I cannot move from here, so we're doing a lot of work online,” he said.

Fr Attard said that more compassions and “more conscious solidarity with elderly people” needs to be shown, as “statistics show that one out of five elderly people who contract Covid-19 end up dying.”

However, he did note that a lot of solidarity and generosity is being shown, something which impressed him and which he truly appreciates.

“What I'm noticing is in this time of crisis, a lot of solidarity is being shown. Those who work as front liners, educators, those who work in supermarkets... these are all showing a lot of generosity. These are the protagonists ... when the system failed, they were there. Without them, I don't know where we would have ended up.”

The sense of uncertainty during this time, as well as how Covid-19 has affected younger adults and adolescents, is something which he highlighted as major issues the world is facing and that we need to tackle.

“If you had to ask the word that is constantly coming up again and again in my mind is ‘uncertainty’. Total uncertainty,” he mused.

“The word struck me because when I was in contact with the younger generation, you see that they have lost the sense of day to day living that give them the sense of being close together. We need to study this in the future, as we have to see the impact it will leave on them. We need to show compassion with this generation.”

Fr Attard also called for vigilance and caution even after Covid-19 passes, as there will certainly be no return to the past, he said.

“When this passes, we can't close this event in brackets – definitely not... There is not going to be a return to the past. The past is gone,” he reflected. 

“As a person, I used to give a lot of attention to planning... I was giving too much importance to everything that is a human contribution. To organise society and life. A virus came, and it completely demolished the system. It made it null.” 

On a final ruminating note, Fr Attard remarked how the pandemic has thought us that we have been taking the very simplest of things in our daily lives for granted – especially human relationships and connections.

“We are trying to find human relationships that have inert value in them... these are not big things, but they are so small, and we have taken them so for granted that we lost the perception of their value,” he said.

“This experience has obliged me to give value to the simplest of things that when the virus came like a tsunami, those things were the things that we searched for.”

Empathy, then, is the solution to this maelstrom that Covid-19 has hurled us into – but which has also thought us, he believed.

“The sense of listening and the attitude of listening, the fact a person you know is going through a very hard time, has lost his job, doesn't know how he is going to pay his rent if they have a mortgage ... these are really dire situations.”

“We need to develop these values not only as if we are forced to, but as they would benefit us if we cultivate them,” Fr Attard meditated.