By Nicole Winfield
Associated Press
ROME (AP) — Pope Francis has written and spoken at length about sickness, aging and death, and personally directed that his doctors provide the fairly detailed daily updates that have punctuated his own battle with pneumonia.
On Monday, they reported good news: Francis was no longer in imminent danger of death but needed to remain hospitalized for several more days to receive treatment.
The 88-year-old pope is merely responding to the sometimes morbid interest in the health of popes over centuries, and is making his own the somewhat-mixed legacy of St. John Paul II. The Polish pope suffered from Parkinson’s disease, and his decline was on public view for years. But the Vatican never admitted he had the disease until after he was dead.
Francis’ candor with his own fragility is very much in keeping with a decision he made early on in his papacy to be up front about his health: He granted an unprecedented tell-all interview to an Argentine doctor who published a book in 2021 detailing Francis’ physical and mental health history. And last week, Francis recorded an audio message from the hospital that laid bare the weakness of his voice, and the labored, breathless effort it took for him to utter just a few words.
Here are a few of Francis’ past musings on sickness, ageing and death and how they might affect the future of his pontificate.
On growing old:
Francis has long complained about the way society treats old people, saying they are part of today’s consumerist “throwaway culture” when they are deemed no longer productive. For that reason especially, he insisted that Pope Benedict XVI continue to be part of the life of the church during his 10-year retirement.
Francis’ views on ageing have been consistent, even as he himself has aged and become dependent on a wheelchair and walker to get around.
In the 2010 book “On Heaven and Earth,” written alongside his friend the Argentine Rabbi Abraham Skorka, Francis denounced the cruelty that confronts elderly people. He shamed families who shut their grandparents away in nursing homes and neglect to visit them.
“The elderly are sources of the transmission of history, the people who give us memories, they are the memory of the people, of a nation, of the family and of the culture, religion,” said Francis, who at the time was the archbishop of Buenos Aires.
On death in general:
In the same book, then-Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio recalled that his grandmother Rosa, who helped raise him, had the words of an adage framed on her bedside table that stayed with him all his life: “See that God sees you, see that he is watching you, see that you will die and you don’t know when.”
He referred to the saying again in 2018 in a speech to priests, and that his grandmother had instructed him to recite it every day “’so you will remember that life has an end.’”
“I didn’t understand much at the time, but that verse, since I was three years old, has stuck with me,” he told the priests. “And it helped me. The thing was kind of bleak, but it helped me.”
On his own health problems:
The Argentine journalist and physician, Dr. Nelson Castro, revealed in his 2021 book “The Health of Popes,” that Francis had reached out to him within a few months of his 2013 election with a suggestion that he write a book about the history of the health of the popes, including his own.
Castro was granted access to the Vatican Secret Archives to research the lives and deaths of past popes and had a sit-down interview with Francis on Feb. 19, 2019, during which the reigning pope spoke at length and in detail about his various ailments over the years: The respiratory infection that resulted in the removal of the upper lobe of his right lung, the gangrenous gallbladder he had removed when he was provincial superior of the Jesuits, the compressed vertebrae, flat feet and fatty liver he has lived with.
The most noteworthy revelation was that Francis said he saw a psychiatrist weekly during six months of Argentina’s military dictatorship. He had sought out help to manage his anxiety when he was trying to hide people from the military and ferry them out of Argentina.
“In those six months she helped me with respect to how to manage the fears of that time,” he told Castro. “If you can imagine what it was like to transport someone hidden in the car — covered by a blanket — and pass through military controls. … It created an enormous tension in me.”
He said the therapy also helped him to maintain a sense of equilibrium in making decisions of all kinds, and that in general he believes all priests must understand human psychology.
“We should offer a mate to our neuroses,” he said, referring to the South American tea. “They are our companions for life.”
On his own death:
As early as 2014 Francis was already assuming his papacy would be short-lived and that his own death was not far off.
“I realize that this is not going to last long, two or three years, and then … off to the house of the Father,” he told reporters in 2014 while traveling home from one of his early foreign trips, to South Korea.
He told Castro later that he thought about death — a lot — but that it didn’t scare him “one bit.”
Francis made plans, too: He decided his tomb will be in St. Mary Major basilica, not in the Vatican, so he can be near his favorite icon of the Madonna, the Salus Populi Romani (“Salvation of the People of Rome”), which is located there.
More recently, he has taken to speaking about upcoming events that he is pretty sure he won’t be around for, and indicating who might.
In 2023, speaking to reporters about the Vatican’s warming relations with Vietnam, Francis concurred that the country warranted a papal visit.
“If I don’t go, surely John XXIV will,” he said chuckling, referring to a future pope who might be named for the progressive, Vatican II-era pontiff, John XXIII.
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