In the days following the Vatican on 6 February that Pope Francis had bronchitis and would have limited his activities to his residence, he continued to keep a private public per day with groups of nuns, pilgrims and leaders of the bases.
On February 9, he chaired an outdoor mass in Piazza di San Pietro, where the wind was so strong that he made him explode the white zocker from his head. He could not end his homily, passing it on to an assistant and saying: “I have difficulty breathing”.
Three days later, to his weekly audience on Wednesday, the sick Pope had a helper to read his speech. But then he tightened his hand with dozens of prelates, many protruded to whisper the greetings and took photos with Spanish faithful, Milanese military recruits and nuns from the order of Mother Teresa.
Two days later, Francis was brought to the hospital, with what the doctors said was a complex medical condition that evolved into pneumonia in both lungs. In an update on Saturday evening, the Vatican said that the Pope was in critical condition after having a long “asthmatic respiratory crisis” at the beginning of the day.
Many who know him said in the interviews that Francis, led by a sense of mission and a discipline born from his initial formation, essentially turned into the hospital.
He is now forced to bed after weeks of ceremonies and public – both private and public – who intensify only with the beginning of December 2025 Jubilee, a year of faith, penance and forgiveness of sins that take place only every quarter of a century.
But the exhausting program of the Pope-that would exhaust anyone, let alone an 88-year-old with a series of health problems-is in line with Francis’ personality and with his vision of the papacy, say doctors, biographers and observers of the Vatican.
“The Pope worries a lot of the Church, so it is clear that he put the Church in first place,” said dr. Luigi Carbone, the Pope’s personal doctor in the Vatican, on Friday during a briefing in the hospital.
Dr. Sergio Alfieri, another of the Pope’s doctors, added that “he did not hold back because he is enormously generous, so he got tired”.
Francis became pope late in life – he was 76 years old – and he was determined to draw the best because he suspected that, relatively speaking, he would not keep his position for a long time. A year in his papacy, he told journalists who thought he would be Pope for two or three years, then “away from his father’s house”.
That forecast was clearly wrong. Instead, he established a program – wake up before 5 and his desk for 6 to face a whole day of work – that Nelson Castro, the author of the book “The Health of Papes”, called “Crazy”. Just last September, Francis made the longest and most complicated journey of his mandate: a four-day tour of four days in the Asia-Pacific region.
“For Francis, it’s all or nothing,” said Austen Ivereigh, Catholic commentator and papal biographer. According to Francis, it was “an essential dimension of the papacy” that people had constant access to him, and there was no time to be inaccessible for health reasons.
“His main concern is not to prolong his life, his main concern is to exercise the papal ministry in the way he believes he should be exercised, which is all in 100 %,” said Ivereigh.
“He has a crazy program,” said another biographer, the Argentine journalist, Elisabetta Piqué. Next to his official morning program, he has a parallel and equally complete agenda for the afternoon. “He always says, I will have time to rest in the next world,” he said.
Francis had a profound sense of duty that had been instilled by the college he attended as a child, managed by the Salesian religious congregation, and subsequently by the Jesuit order who joined in 1958, said Fabio Marchese Ragona, another biographer.
He said that Francis had told him that he had joined the Jesuits “especially for the discipline” and that the maintenance of the commitments had been perforated in him – as he came soon for the appointments.
Carlo Musso, who worked with Francis on “Hope”, an autobiography that was published last month, observed: “The word he used most, the exhortation I remember best, is” forward “. Even when He was looking back, it was so that he could go on. “
People who know Francis claim to be resistant to take a break, even when it should because of sciatica, a bad knee or recurring bronchial problems. As a young man, he removed the upper lobe of his right lung and suffered from attack attacks and bronchitis during the winter months.
“It is so stubborn; He is a stubborn, “said Dr. Castro, using the Italian word for stubborn. And the Pope admitted to being” a very difficult patient “, he added.
The Pope once told him that he liked to keep his distance from the doctors, dr. Castro said: “It means that he wants to make decisions” on what he can and cannot do.
Mr. Ivereigh said that Francis had admitted that one of his “great defects” was obstinacy. “It is very strong and does not read the suggestions that cut things promptly,” he said.
Musso stressed that a few hours before being brought to the hospital, Francis held the public with the Prime Minister of the Slovak Republic, the president of the CNN and the representatives of a beneficial organization that works in Puerto Rico. “He has a huge work skills,” he said.
The Pope does not disappear for the summer holidays, added Musso. That habit, said Mrs. Piqué, is a source of disappointment for many Vatican employees. His last real holiday was in 1975, Francis himself said in his autobiography “Hope”.
John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI Summer in the papal residence of Castel Gandolfo, although the first I also work for mountain stays in northern Italy.
Francesco Antonio Grana, a Vatican journalist of the newspaper of Rome Il Fatto Quotidiano, said that he did not help the fact that Francis had surrounded himself by “yes men” who abandoned themselves to the Pope.
“This hospitalization could have been avoided” if someone had slowed down the Pope’s program, said Mr. Grana.
“I prefer a living pope of a pope who died because he kept another commitment in his agenda,” he added. “With Donald Trump to the White House, the world needs a live and combative pope.”
The same week he went to the hospital, Francis wrote an open letter to the bishops in the United States by criticizing the policy of President Trump of mass deportations of immigrants and resisted Trump on issues such as climate change.
Francis’ workload was not only difficult, but also brought him in contact with hundreds of people who could potentially transmit diseases, said Massimo Andreoni, emeritus professor of infectious diseases at the University of Rome Tor Vergata. “So maybe he should be more careful when he has a cold or bronchitis and perhaps slow down a little and take care of himself a little more,” he added.
There are some signs that the Pope could be ready to slow down.
Francis was visited in the hospital on Wednesday by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni d’Italia. By reporting to the meeting, the Milan Corriere della Sera newspaper wrote that Francis complained with the prime minister: “The doctors said that I have to take some free time” and that “I have to be careful of my health, otherwise I go directly to Paradiso. “
On Friday, during a briefing of news, Francis’s doctors clarified that they would keep him in the hospital until he needed treatments he could only receive there, rather than bringing him home to his residence at Casa Santa Marta.
“We think it’s prudent,” said dr. Alfieri. “If we took him to Santa Marta, he would have started working as before, we know it.”