Friday, March 13

The room in the Hellenic Parliament was too large for the few people in it. The air carried the faint, sterile scent of disinfectant, not the expected fragrance of bouquets. On March 13, 2020, Katerina Sakellaropoulou placed her hand on the bible and swore the oath of office, her voice clear in the hollow silence. There was no applause. The required social distance between the handful of officials—masks obscuring the lower halves of their faces—turned a state ceremony into a series of isolated gestures.

Outside, Athens was unnervingly still. The strict COVID-19 measures had emptied the streets that would have normally filled with celebration. The historic weight of the moment—the breaking of a male-only tradition in the highest office—collided with the visceral reality of a pandemic. The cameras captured the event, but they could not capture the sound of a missing nation. The rustle of a document, the click of a pen, the echo of footsteps on marble—these were the sounds of the day.

Sakellaropoulou’s eyes, above her light blue mask, showed focus, not triumph. The ceremony was not a culmination but an initiation into a crisis. The presidency she inherited was immediately defined not by precedent, but by pandemic. The image of that solitary figure taking the oath in the vast, quiet chamber became the definitive portrait of the era: a milestone reached in isolation, a step forward taken in a world holding its breath.

At 19:06 Rome time, white smoke. The crowd in St. Peter’s Square, damp and cold from a persistent rain, erupted. The bells of St. Peter’s began to ring, confirming the election. The waiting was precise, measured in conclaves and ballots. The announcement, when it came, was a sequence of established facts.

Cardinal Protodeacon Jean-Louis Tauran appeared on the loggia. ‘Annuntio vobis gaudium magnum.’ I announce to you a great joy. ‘Habemus Papam.’ We have a Pope. He gave the name: Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of the Society of Jesus. A pause. Then the chosen name: Franciscus.

The choice was the statement. Jorge Bergoglio was the first Jesuit Pope, the first from the Americas, the first from the Southern Hemisphere. He took the name of Francis of Assisi, the saint of poverty, humility, and care for creation. The facts were presented without commentary. The cardinal gave the name. The new Pope appeared. He asked for a silent prayer. He asked for the crowd to pray for him.

There were no lengthy speeches. The event was a delivery of information. A man from Argentina was now Pope Francis. The historical firsts were implicit. The theological and pastoral direction was implied by a single word. The power of the moment resided in what was not said, in the space between the announcement and the interpretation, in the quiet that followed the bells.

The transition of power within the Missionaries of Charity contained no campaign, no debate, no political maneuvering. On March 13, 1997, six months before Mother Teresa’s death, the sisters of the order gathered in their motherhouse chapel in Calcutta. Their founder was frail. The question of succession was a practical and spiritual necessity. They prayed. They voted. They selected Sister Nirmala Joshi, a convert from Hinduism, a former law student who had joined the order in 1958 and later led its contemplative branch.

The scale of the moment was vast, yet its execution was infinitesimally small. Here was a global institution, with thousands of sisters operating in over 100 countries, entrusted to a woman known for her deep silence and meditation. She was not a charismatic figurehead, but a deliberate continuation. The order, built on the ‘wholehearted free service to the poorest of the poor,’ required a leader who embodied the work, not the legend.

Sister Nirmala accepted with characteristic humility. She saw herself not as a replacement, but as a custodian of a charism. The world watched, expecting perhaps a dramatic change, but the mission simply persisted. The sick were still comforted, the hungry fed, the dying accompanied. The leadership changed hands as quietly as a sister takes up a new task in the home for the destitute. It was a testament to an idea: that a life of service creates its own gravity, its own succession, independent of any single individual. The work, itself, was the perpetual entity.

A Mi-17 helicopter of the Serbian Army lifts off from Belgrade airport on a clear March night. Its mission is specific, human in scale: transport a five-day-old baby boy with acute respiratory problems to a specialized hospital. The infant is in an incubator. A medical team attends him. The crew flies. It is a machine of war repurposed for an act of care. At 20:15, it crashes into a field near the runway. All seven people on board are killed. The baby dies with them.

The event is a closed loop of failed intention. The apparatus of the state, its military hardware, was mobilized for a singular life. The effort contained its own negation. What does it say that our most organized systems, designed for protection and power, can so utterly collapse in the moment they turn to pure mercy? The tragedy lacks the grand narrative of a battle or a natural disaster. It is a small, terrible knot.

We build institutions to shield us from chaos. We trust in procedure, in technology, in trained personnel. This crash is a reminder that the shield is brittle. The line between salvation and catastrophe is as thin as the skin of a helicopter fuselage. The incident fades from international news, a local sorrow. But it persists as a question: does the magnitude of our systems ever match the fragility of the individual lives they are meant, in the end, to serve? The seven deaths answer in the negative.