A form of religious discourse of Roman Catholics, a homily, through the wholeness of its message, serves the purpose of challenging, enlightening, directing, and conveying Scripture’s inspiration to believers. How these homiletic purposes are delivered during the onslaught of the cataclysmic COVID-19 pandemic ideates research interest, particularly in linguistics. This study aimed to examine cohesion through the use of cohesive devices in the pandemic homilies of Pope Francis in an attempt to foster discourse wholeness and connection with his audience. Following a qualitative-discourse analysis, this study delved into 10 randomly selected homilies. Based on the findings, Pope Francis’ homilies manifest using cohesive devices: grammatical cohesion (reference, substitution ellipsis, and conjunction); and lexical cohesion (reiteration and collocation). These devices played crucial roles in the pope’s homilies, weaving together seemingly disparate clauses, sentences, and paragraphs to reveal a unified whole and highlight the progression of his ideas amid a global health crisis. On the whole, the study argues that cohesive devices, brought together to form a unified whole discourse,  may shape how homilies are perceived by the audience and the manner through which they would accordingly show response and action. Implications to homiletics and further linguistic studies on the present study’s corpora have been put forward by this study.

Keywords: Cohesion, Pandemic Homilies, Pope Francis.

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