Mobility and Lockdown: Challenges to the Human and

In the 2 words of Laudato Si’, it is an invitation to be more attentive to the double cry of the earth and of the poor. [...] We have realized that we are on the same boat, all of us fragile and disoriented, but at the same time important and needed, all of us called to row together, each of us in need of comforting the other. [...] We need to find a cure both for this “small but terrible virus,” and for the “larger virus” of social injustice, inequality of opportunity, marginalization, and the lack of protection for the weakest.15 The prescription offered by Pope Francis unleashes the “antibodies of justice, charity, and solidarity.”16 How might we develop those antibodies? Pope Francis spent two months discussing the antido. [...] In the nine Wednesday General Audiences of August and September, the Holy Father applied the principles of Catholic social teaching— human dignity, the common good, solidarity, subsidiarity, the universal destination of goods, the preferential option for the poor, and care for our common home—to the current pandemic-induced challenges. [...] And if we don’t start there, there will be no conversion.”18 The new normal to which we are called is “that of the Kingdom of God, where ‘the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.’”19 17 General Audience, 19 August 2020.