We’re a long way from the May processions of yesteryear, but this month, I’m putting my faith in prayer

India is pyretic with the virus and the dead; social-media making gods of us in who to help. Medical-student ambulance crews? Mothers of newborns? Rickshaw drivers supporting generations? Humanitarian bills of sale, photos, medical records, verifications attached; online manifests for the last transports out of Hell?

Writer Arundhati Roy calls what is happening in her country “a crime against humanity”, people dying in front of hospitals within a breath of help, safety; the rich “felled”’ along with the poor. It will take Italy decades to recover culturally, psychologically, spiritually from its Covid trauma.

In Brazil this week Medici Senza Frontiere are dumbstruck by the human wreckage of the virus they are finding, treating. So, when Pope Francis calls for May to be the month of global prayer for an end to the Covid pandemic? God – all ye gods – I’m in. May is the traditional month of Mary – Catholicism getting in on Roman Flora, Greek Maia. For decades, on May Day, Gay Byrne kicked off the Marian month with tenor Canon Sydney MacEwan singing Bring Flowers of the Fairest. And we did: generations of school-goers laden with lilacs for the May altar, those alert to the superstition about bringing them indoors, hanging between miracles and catastrophe for the month. I know a few lilac bearers who have taken to praying on the sly, “rabid secularists” tiptoeing into Westland Row or Clarendon Street to light a candle.

On the day after the Chauvin verdict, George Floyd’s sister asked America to pray. “Prayer changes things,” she said. And what is prayer now? Our m’aidez for the soul? Sit with the dying and feel the shock of “now and at the hour of our death” on the tongue. Skip the “and”. Amen. It’s too early in our recovery from the State’s fealty to Rome to be happy with our politicians making like the Bidens and Obamas in their unselfconscious public praying, a few bars of Amazing Grace. I believe in the separation of Church and State. But not that the separation should preclude the potential of faith to tackle some of the big issues in society. Look at Brother Kevin and the Muslim Sisters of Eire. “I was hungry and you gave me to eat” seems to be common to all faiths, our shared humanity.

Prince Philip figured out in the 60s that it was not politics but faith and the arts that could touch hearts and minds deeply enough to save the Earth.

This paper’s Mary Kenny was writing recently, how, in an increasingly-secular era, pilgrimage is all the rage. Now we’re all to hit the great outdoors, our own pilgrim routes might be only trotting after the Camino and the Via di Francigena. For weather? There’s a tiny Infant de Prague, all jewel-green, gold-crowned, pink-cheeked, dotey, who arrived in a matchbox from the city itself, ideal for pilgrim planting, transporting.

Never sure about the Son, like many women, I have faith in His Mother, envy the Orthodox faiths their icons and incensing of Mary as Theotokos, Mother of God. Sure, her young fella might be God. But she is God’s Mammy, someone to turn to for family, present, past, future. Since life can be so god-bloody-awful it’s not sentimental, but sensible, to pray for those to come; a generational prewash for the soul, a great-great-grandmother’s legacy of intention.

Today, despite secular business, plane and ship manifests still count their human cargo as “souls”. In the migrant Mediterranean there are shoals of them. More added this week. While polishing his beads for the May marathon, the Pope can open up the newspaper La Repubblica and read how just as Italy was banning flights from India, a plane from Delhi with 211 souls on board landed in Rome, with 23 Covid positives, which is 9pc.   

Initial tests show at least three cases of “super-spreader” viral load, with health authorities warning at those rates 90pc of passengers would probably be infected in-flight, testing positive in the days to come.

The May days of prayer that are before us.

Here at home, long after we gave up the May Processions with velvet-caped boys scattering rose-petals from pewter buckets, the legions of First Communicants, silk and lace rustling, silver medals gleaming, veils and souls dazzling, milk teeth wobbling, we still retain the muscle-memory of prayer. We take Heaney at his word on miracles and cures and healing wells.

In May, we pray for Covid lungs 1,300g, brain 1,400g, heart 300g. And for the extra 21g – three-quarters of an ounce in the Imperial Measurement – considered to be the weight of the soul.

In India the virus and the fires burn. Three hundred thousand souls. The skies over Delhi, Mumbai, Lucknow are heavy.