“In recent days, he complained of respiratory difficulties, for which he had to undergo medical check-ups on the day,” the director of the Holy See’s press office, Matteo Bruni, explained in a note.
The medical controls “revealed a respiratory infection” and although covid-19 has been excluded, “it will require several days of adequate hospital medical treatment,” he specified.
According to internal sources at the hospital, it is possible that the pontiff could preside over the Palm Sunday mass in the Vatican, “except for unforeseen events.”
With this mass the celebrations for Holy Week open, which culminates with Easter, the most important festival of Christianity.
In any case, these are long and exhausting ceremonies for a person who has been hospitalized for several days.
Francisco He also has a trip to Hungary scheduled for the end of April, to the city of Budapest, to attend the closing of an International Eucharistic Encounter.
– Resignation not ruled out –
The hospitalization surprised public opinion, especially since on Wednesday Jorge Bergoglio participated with complete normality in the traditional general audience in Saint Peter’s Square, during which he appeared smiling, greeting the faithful from his “popemobile”.
“Dad: The great fear”, headlined the newspaper La Stampa this Thursday describing those dramatic moments, after he pointed out “a strong pain in the chest” for which his assistants decided to urgently call an ambulance and hospitalize him immediately.
Franciscowho has been using a wheelchair since May 2022 due to arthritis in one knee, underwent colon surgery in July 2021 at the same hospital in Rome, where he stayed for ten days.
In front of the journalists who usually accompany him on his trips, Francisco He said that this intervention left him “aftermath” due to the anesthesia and that for this reason he ruled out undergoing a knee operation again.
Those medical issues forced him to cancel several hearings in 2022 and postpone a trip to Africa, raising many questions about a potential resignation.
In several interviews granted in recent months, the dad He has spoken of the possibility of resigning, just as his predecessor, Benedict XVI, who died at the end of 2022, did in 2013.
“It is true that I wrote my resignation two months after my election (in March 2013)… I did it in case I have any health problem that prevents me from exercising my ministry,” he said. Franciscoalthough he successively clarified that he had not yet thought of resigning from his post.
In July of last year, he confessed that “he could no longer travel” with the same rhythm as before and assured that he could “step aside”.
A month ago he spoke about the subject again to clarify that the resignation of a dad “It should not become a fashion” and stressed that this idea “was not on his agenda at the moment.”
The pontiff is constantly cared for by a team of doctors and nurses, either in the Vatican or during his trips abroad.
A more than necessary measure due to his age and his medical history, since at the age of 21 he was on the verge of dying from pleurisy and suffered a partial ablation of one of his lungs.
