Pope Francis – A Difficult Moment

Dear Blog Readers,

I have spent the past two weeks with many colleagues shuttling between the Gemelli Hospital in Rome and the Vatican press office as we cover the hospitalization of Pope Francis for pneumonia.

The story broke suddenly on Friday February 14^th, Valentine’s Day. I was sitting in the office with colleagues when we got word that after his morning audiences, the Pope was going to the hospital to get better care for his bronchitis.

We knew the Pope had been struggling for days with bronchitis and had given up reading several speeches because had difficulty breathing.  We had also noticed that his face was very swollen, and apparently that happens when someone is taking a lot of cortisone.

Within ten minutes I was in the office car with AP cameraman Paolo Lucariello headed for Gemelli hospital in Rome; video-journalist Silvia Stellacci was rushing to the hospital from her home; video-journalist Paolo Santalucia was rushing to the Vatican gate to get the Pope’s car leaving; our top “Vaticanista” wire reporter, Nicole Winfield, was firing off alerts, and Senior Producer Maria Grazia Murru was kicking our whole Vatican illness/death plan into motion.

It turns out the Pope had more than bronchitis, he had pneumonia in both his lungs. Francis had part of his right lung removed during an illness in his youth making him prone to respiratory difficulties.  On top of that he is 88, has difficulty walking due to a bad knee, and had 33 centimeters of his colon removed in 2021.

The Gemelli hospital has a special suite on its 10^th floor for Popes.  Pope John Paul II was taken there after an assassin’s bullet went through his stomach in 1981.  We were rushing to the hospital to get visuals of the Pope arriving and then a live camera focused on the windows of that 10th floor suite.

AP has been going through a “digital transformation” and now wants all of us to do one minute video explainers that can be used on social media.  This is the one AP asked that I do as soon as I got to the hospital. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7P_d2nQHjvE

Now it has been over two weeks, and we have not seen the Pope.  The situation is much worse than any of us thought at the beginning.  We get a terse notification from the Vatican every morning around 8am mostly saying that the Holy Father slept well and is resting.  Around 11am the Pope’s spokesman gives us a background briefing and then at 7pm there is the doctor’s report for the day followed by another background briefing. We spend our time trying to read into it all and sort out the medical information.

Since going to the hospital he has had tubes in his nose and face masks to help him get sufficient oxygen.  He is being treated with a lot of drugs, according to the doctors, who are tyring various combinations of antibiotics and cortisone. They had to do a blood transfusion because he was anaemic and was showing signs of early kidney failure. The doctor said if the infection gets into his bloodstream he will get “sepsis” and that would be extremely dangerous. In a crisis this week a coughing fit prompted him to vomit and then he inhaled some of it.  That required bronco-aspiration to try to clear his lungs of dangerous substances.

There is now an encampment of journalists from all over the world on the hill facing the hospital.  There are dozens of cameras lined up, focused on the hospital and in particular the 10^th floor windows of the suite where Francis is staying.  It has rained a lot during these past two weeks and the hilltop has become a muddy mess.  As when Pope John Paul II was very ill in the hospital in the last years of his life, I have had the sensation that we journalists are a bunch of vultures perched on this hilltop just waiting for a papal death so we can swoop down and selfishly gather up our bits of news.  But I remember clearly being surprised when John Paul II, from his hospital bed thanked the media for being there, for sharing his suffering with the faithful around the world so they could pray for him.  I wonder if Pope Francis feels the same way.

During previous hospital stays Francis has appeared at the window for his Sunday Angelus prayer and visited children in the paediatric cancer ward. Over the past few weeks, we have not seen him at all, which is worrisome.

He did provide his Angelus prayer today with the following message:

We have interviewed dozens of the faithful coming from all over the world who stop to pray for Francis at the statue of John Paul II that is in the piazza outside the hospital and below the 10^th floor windows.

Here are a few of the comments:

Sister Maria Anugraha, a nun from Kerala, India came to sit by the statue of John Paul II and pray for Pope Francis, “As a woman, I feel that he has done a lot to bring women to the forefront of the church, especially to administrative and leadership levels,” she said. “And also he has a lot of sympathy for the migrants and those in the peripheries of the society. So he has definitely done a lot to bring those in the peripheries to the forefront, especially the suffering. And he has also prayed and intervened to bring peace, especially in time of war in Ukraine and Israel.”

Francesca Astengo, a resident in Rome, said she would remember him for his, “attention for the poor above all, to the last, the marginalized, he also tried to change the face of the Roman Curia in the sense that the idea that we all have of all the apparatus that moves around the Vatican, he tried in every possible way to make people understand that the papacy is close to the people and he himself was always very close to the people. He always used simple methods, direct, understandable for everyone. He did not exclude any means of communication direct and indirect..”

Ennio Narducci brought a candle to light for Pope Francis outside Gemelli Hospital. He said his father used to work for the Vatican and he grew up living in a Vatican apartment and sometimes would even play inside St. Peter’s Basilica when he went with his father to work.

“He’s tough. He is a man who makes people listen to him. Just like Pope Wojtyla (John Paul II), they are people who have a purpose in the world, they know what they have to do. They are not the classic popes who only look at the Christian world, they also see the desperation that there is in the world, the wars, and all that.”

VATICAN

On the other side of Rome, there is a strange atmosphere at the Vatican, Cardinals are holding nightly rosary prayers in St. Peter’s Square for Francis’ speedy recovery presenting a visually unified front in their dedication to the Holy Father.

However, rumors of Francis’s possible resignation or imminent death have swirled around Rome and the Vatican for days, with Vatican experts and journalists analyzing every Cardinal’s statement, and closely monitoring the actions of any visitors to the Pope’s bedside as we try to read the tea leaves.

When questioned by a journalist from an Italian daily about the rumors of resignation, the Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Parolin said “useless speculation,” and Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernandez,  speaking to an Argentinian newspaper, said “I don’t see a pre-conclave atmosphere.”

AP asked me if I could do a little on-camera explainer noting the odd juxtaposition of the film “Conclave” being a top-contender for an Oscar when the idea of a papal transition and eventual Conclave is on the minds of many.

Here it is: https://apnews.com/article/pope-vatican-oscars-conclave-cb2073e1e0d25fe0fa8a7ff48e267586

Over the past few weeks I have spoken several times with Austen Ivereigh, author of “The Great Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope,” and one of the Pope’s many biographers.  Ivereigh confirmed for me what I already believe and that it is highly unlikely for the Pope to resign.

“I’ve always thought that and many people do think he’s the kind of person who would sort of die in his boots,” Ivereigh said, “There’s no question that he’s not the resigning type.”

But Ivereigh couched it a little bit, leaving open the possibility of his resignation
“I think he will carry on if he can. He has no problem with being a frail pope. He has no problem with doing things differently. We’ve seen him in a wheelchair the last few years and often having a bronchitic condition. None of this prevents him being pope. If, however, I think they said to him, look, your health is going to be a major issue from now on. You’ve got a severe impairment here which will require regular hospitalisation. In other words, if it’s the long-term condition that he’s often spoke about, that would be probably a cause for him to think about resignation.”

We are waiting to see what happens.

As I have rushed back and forth between the Vatican, the hospital and home these past two weeks, I have been reflecting on the past 12 years covering Pope Francis.

I am not a “Vaticanista” – a full-fledged Vatican correspondent who covers the Vatican exclusively– but I have spent a lot of time covering Pope Francis since the day, March 13, 2013 he was elected.  I went back and looked at a blog post I wrote about that day and here were my first impressions when he emerged on the balcony at the center of St. Peter’s Basilica after being elected:

FROM BLOG POST COVERING THE ELECTION OF POPE FRANCIS – MARCH 13, 2013

https://www.mozzarellamamma.com/2013/a-birds-eye-view-of-the-election-of-pope-francis/

“The first thing I noticed was that he was not wearing the red silk cape on top of his white vestments unlike the first appearance of Benedict XVI.

The first word the new Pope Francis said was “Buonasera” (Good evening).  It was so casual, so human, so normal.  I started to like him.  He then went on, “You know the duty of the conclave was to give Rome a bishop. It seems that my brother cardinals picked him from almost the end of the earth. But here we are.”

He then went on to say a prayer for Benedict XVI, and then led the crowd in reciting the “Our Father” the “Hail Mary” and the “Gloria”.  The next day, Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston was nearly in tears of emotion as he described to reporters standing at the window in St. Peter’s Basilica with the other Cardinals and seeing this mass of people reciting these simple prayers.

Then before giving his blessing to the crowd, Pope Francis did something that surprised me.  He asked the crowd to do him “a favor”.  He asked the crowd to pray to the Lord to bless him in silence and then he bent down before all of us.  The square was silent as we stared at the top of his head bent before us on the loggia.  That was the best moment for me.  A sign of humility that I think will mark this papacy.”

Needless to say, Pope Francis has been an important figure in my life.

I travelled to 24 countries to cover Pope Francis, either on the Papal plane or separately: Jordan, Israel, Palestine, Albania, Turkey, Cuba, the United States, Mexico, Armenia, Hungary, Slovakia, Greece, Malta, Canada, France, Columbia, Ireland, Panama, Romania, Madagascar, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and South Sudan, Belgium, and Luxembourg.

Many of these trips I described the “behind the scenes” of our news coverage for AP in my blog posts.  I will share the links below.

There are a lot of common threads that have emerged, the humility that I noticed the first day he came out on the balcony, his joy and desire to be with regular, hard-working, common people.  We have often noticed his grouchy countenance when posing for photos with world leaders or curial Cardinals, but during his weekly audience he comes alive, kissing every baby that is handed to him as his popemobile makes its way through St. Peter’s Square.  I have seen him throughly enjoying himself with migrants in refugee camps, having heartfelt conversations with prisoners, and touching, caressing, comforting the sick and homeless.  He has done his best to take the Catholic Church to the peripheries, to make the church  bigger and more welcoming tent.  He has also been consistent in his battle to save mother earth and has never hesitated to denounce the rampant consumerism in modern society.

In addition to his determination to help migrants, prisoners and homeless people, he was the first Pope to show an understanding of the difficulties of the LGPTQ+ community.  I had a great time doing this story on a group of transgender women, many of them sex workers, who were thrilled to be invited to join an annual lunch that the Pope hosted for poor people in Rome.

 

BLOG POSTS

TOUCHING THE WALLS – POPE FRANCIS IN THE MIDDLE EAST (Israel and Palestine)

https://www.mozzarellamamma.com/2014/touching-the-walls-pope-francis-in-the-mideast/

FENCE BARBED WIRE AND WALLS IN JUAREZ WITH POPE FRANCIS (Juarez)

https://www.mozzarellamamma.com/2016/fences-barbed-wire-and-walls-in-juarez-with-pope-francis/

FOLLOWING POPE FRANCIS IN CHIAPAS FOR AP TELEVISION

A MEXICAN FIESTA FOR POPE FRANCIS

https://www.mozzarellamamma.com/2016/facing-drugs-disappearances-and-death-with-the-pope-in-mexico/

INTO THE TIERRA CALIENTE WITH POPE FRANCIS (Mexico)

https://www.mozzarellamamma.com/2016/into-the-tierra-caliente-with-pope-francis/

HOPES DREAMS AND HUMIDITY WITH POPE FRANCIS IN CUBA

https://www.mozzarellamamma.com/2015/hopes-dreams-and-humidity-with-pope-francis-in-cuba/

HACKS IN BLACK ON THE PAPAL PLANE WITH POPE FRANCIS (Washington, Pennsylvania and New York)

https://www.mozzarellamamma.com/2015/hacks-in-black-on-the-papal-plane-with-pope-francis/

POPE’S TRIP TO AFRICA NOTEBOOK (Democratic Republic of the Congo and South Sudan)

https://www.mozzarellamamma.com/2023/popes-trip-to-africa-notebook/

POPE FRANCIS APOLOGIZES (Canada Trip)

https://www.mozzarellamamma.com/2022/pope-francis-apologizes/

POPE FRANCIS MEETS THE FOREIGN PRESS ASSOCIATION

https://www.mozzarellamamma.com/2019/pope-francis-and-the-press/

POPE FRANCIS IN PANAMA

https://www.mozzarellamamma.com/2019/panama-with-the-pope-francis/

TRAVELING WITH POPE FRANCIS IN ARMENIA

https://www.mozzarellamamma.com/2016/traveling-pope-francis-armenia/

ONE YEAR FOLLOWING POPE FRANCIS

https://www.mozzarellamamma.com/2014/one-year-following-pope-francis/

A BIRD’S EYE VIEW OF THE ELECTION OF POPE FRANCIS

https://www.mozzarellamamma.com/2013/a-birds-eye-view-of-the-election-of-pope-francis/

FRANCESCO FRENZY

https://www.mozzarellamamma.com/2013/francesco-frenzy/

THE REVOLUTIONARY POPE

https://www.mozzarellamamma.com/2013/the-revolutionary-pope/

THE FIRST POPE INTERVIEW

https://www.mozzarellamamma.com/2013/the-pope-interview/

GOOSEBUMPS IN LAMPEDUSA

https://www.mozzarellamamma.com/2013/goosebumps-in-lampedusa/

*************************************************************************************

In May 18, 2019, when I was serving as President of the Foreign Press Association in Rome, I led a group of more than 200 members of the Foreign Press and their families to a meeting with Pope Francis.  At the end, he sat next to me and posed for this photo.

Here is my blog post from that day:

https://www.mozzarellamamma.com/2019/pope-francis-and-the-press/

Pope Francis is also known for his sense of humor, so I think he might get a laugh over this photo of a little bobble-head Pope Francis that I bought today at a souvenir stand near the Vatican.