In March 2020, then-Archbishop Wilton Gregory faced an unprecedented challenge while leading The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington as the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the world, leaving sickness, death and economic suffering in its wake.
In a statement that month when he announced that Catholic school campuses would close and public Masses would not be celebrated in Catholic Churches in the archdiocese for the time being in accordance with government recommended restrictions to prevent the spread of the deadly virus, then-Archbishop Gregory said, “My number one priority as your archbishop is to ensure the safety and health of all who attend our Masses, the children in our schools, and those we welcome through our outreach and services.”
Then-Archbishop Gregory, who initially issued a dispensation from the obligation to attend Mass to parishioners of the archdiocese during the pandemic, added, “We are profoundly saddened that we are not able to celebrate our sacraments as a community for the time being, but we know Christ remains with us at all times.”
Reflecting back on that time, Washington Auxiliary Bishop Roy Campbell Jr. in a 2025 interview said, “It was not an easy decision. Nationally, everybody had to shut down to stop the spread of the pandemic.” Bishop Campbell said the cardinal knew that confronting the pandemic was going to be challenging at the archdiocesan and parish levels. “He did what was the right thing to do for the people of God,” Bishop Campbell said.
In a March 2020 “What I Have Seen and Heard” column for the Catholic Standard newspaper, then-Archbishop Gregory noted that “even in the uncertainty of this current situation, if we are open, God will use this moment to bring our hearts closer to Him and more firmly in union with one another.”
In his Catholic Standard column the next month, the future cardinal wrote that families staying at home during the coronavirus shutdown would have more time to spend with each other without the usual distractions, and they might find opportunities to pray together. He expressed hope that with the help of prayer, “We will all survive this moment and learn to love God and one another more.”
That April, he celebrated his first Easter Vigil as archbishop of Washington in St. Matthew’s Cathedral without a congregation due to limits on the sizes of public gatherings. The next month, then-Archbishop Gregory announced that public Masses could resume in late May in jurisdictions where restrictions had eased, but he encouraged the continued use of safety measures, including wearing face masks and practicing social distancing. In a video message, he said, “In these past months, in the face of the coronavirus health emergency, we have experienced challenges and hardships unlike any we have ever faced as a nation, a people or a Church. Our best and smartest first response – as in all things – is to turn to the Lord who comforts us and strengthens us. Our Lord walks with us and guides our way forward.”
After the first weekend of the COVID-19 shutdown, Catholic school teachers pivoted to provide online learning for students. Meanwhile, Catholic Charities and parish food pantries mobilized to provide food to people in the community.
In a 2025 interview, Msgr. John Enzler, who formerly was the longtime president and CEO of Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Washington, said, “During the pandemic, the one group that never ceased services was Catholic Charities… Catholic Charities never stopped serving food, running shelters and serving those in need.”
In 2020, Catholic Charities provided more than 3.5 million meals and hosted more than 25 large-scale community food distributions throughout the Washington area, providing food to people who lined up in cars for hours beforehand at each event.
The Archdiocese of Washington launched a Community Food Security Program to support pantries at local parishes and schools. By the summer of 2020, a survey found that 67 or nearly one-half of the archdiocese’s 139 parishes were operating food pantries. Since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting economic downturn, the number of people those parishes were serving was estimated to have doubled to 15,000 people weekly.
Meanwhile in August 2020, the Archdiocese of Washington announced its reopening plan for local Catholic schools during the COVID-19 pandemic. As the 2020-21 school year began, Catholic schools were following a distance learning model, a blended learning model or a modified classroom option. Safety measures for Catholic schools offering in-person learning included mandatory mask wearing, social distances in the spacing of desks, and temperature checks upon students’ arrival.
Eventually as the pandemic subsided, all the Catholic schools resumed offering full in-person learning.
Commenting in a 2025 email, Kelly Branaman, the secretary for Catholic schools and superintendent of schools for the Archdiocese of Washington, praised Cardinal Gregory’s leadership during the pandemic, saying, “Throughout the unprecedented challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, Cardinal Wilton Gregory’s steadfast leadership and unwavering support was invaluable to our Catholic schools. His advocacy and leadership empowered us as Catholic schools to make independent decisions from our public counterparts, allowing for the safe return to in-person learning for some schools as early as August 2020. By distinguishing our approach from that of public schools, Cardinal Gregory ensured that we could continue our mission of providing quality education rooted in faith, even amidst adversity.”
In a Nov. 26, 2020 Thanksgiving letter to the people of the Archdiocese of Washington, Cardinal-designate Gregory said, “We thank the Lord for guiding us through these difficult months of sickness, shutdowns and social distancing. We praise Him for the care and dedication of health care providers, first responders, and volunteers, who have selflessly continued to serve others, demonstrating the virtues of faith, love, hope and mercy to those in need… We are blessed and tremendously grateful for the many people who have ensured that we can resume public worship and safely reopen our schools in various ways.”
In January 2021, Cardinal Wilton Gregory offered the invocation at a pre-inauguration memorial service to honor and remember the more than 400,000 Americans who by that date had died from COVID-19. Joining him at that prayer service at the Lincoln Memorial were then-President-elect Joe Biden and then-Vice President-elect Kamala Harris.
At that service, the cardinal prayed, “Our sorrow unites us to one another as a single people with compassionate hearts. May our prayer strengthen our awareness of our common humanity and our national unity…”
As Washington, D.C., and Maryland began offering COVID-19 vaccines that January, Catholic bishops in that region encouraged people to get vaccinated.
The next month, Cardinal Gregory rolled up his sleeve to receive his COVID-19 vaccine at Holy Cross Hospital in Silver Spring, Maryland, and that photo ran on the front page of the Catholic Standard newspaper.
That May, the cardinal led a recitation of the rosary at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception as part of a worldwide prayer for the end of the COVID-19 pandemic. Also that month, the Archdiocese of Washington announced the easing of some of its restrictions at public Masses. And that June, local Catholics were encouraged to return to Mass, as the archdiocese announced the lifting of the dispensation from the obligation to attend Mass.
In an April 2021 column for the Catholic Standard, the cardinal wrote, “Our Church is currently encountering an enormous challenge that reaches across the entire globe in the wake of the pandemic. We must determine how best to welcome and to urge our people to return to our regular Sunday Eucharist, and it is a pastoral dilemma like none that we have faced before.”
By January 2025, more than 1.2 million people in the United States had died of COVID-19.
In an interview with the archdiocese’s Catholic Standard and El Pregonero newspapers that month, Cardinal Gregory reflected on his service as the archbishop of Washington, and he said in hindsight, he might have taken a different pastoral approach to the pandemic.
“We had never lived through a moment like this, where our ability to be together was so drastically limited. We were afraid to be together. And so I would say, my approach now would be to say as, Pope Saint John Paul II often said, ‘Be not afraid.’ But fear really was a dominant emotion for many people,” Cardinal Gregory said.
He added, “We didn’t know where the disease originated. We didn’t know how it was transmitted. We didn’t know how to approach a resolution. We were filled with doubt and fear. I wish now, four years later, I could have been a better messenger of not being afraid.”
“Now that we have endured that awful moment, we need to prepare ourselves. How will we handle the next crisis? How will we respond to the next disastrous situation that might occur at any moment? We need each other. That was, of all of the things that I have thought about with the pandemic, it heightened our ability or our realization that we cannot be Church alone,” Cardinal Gregory said.
Emphasizing the need for more Catholics to return to Church for Mass after the pandemic, he said, “We need one another, and it means that we have to find ways to be together. We’re still trying to invite people back. There’s still people who are hesitant to be in crowds or to be with their neighbors, with their fellow parishioners. We need to find ways to assure them that, without being together, we miss a terribly important dimension of what it means to be a Catholic.”
The cardinal said that Jesus “founded a Church for men and women to be together, and in the midst of that gathering, where two or three have come together, (Jesus said) ‘I’m in their midst.’”
