The Pope’s illness: between transparency and uncertainty

Rome. Leo XIV, the reserved Pope who speaks little, chose St Peter’s Square, at the end of the Sunday Angelus broadcast worldwide, to announce that during some routine medical checks (as specified yesterday by the Director of the Press Office, Matteo Bruni) a lung nodule had been detected which needs to be removed. Late this morning, he will be admitted to the Policlinico Gemelli. The scenario is the opposite of that seen during the years of Francis, the approachable Pontiff who would stop to speak to everyone, who gave interview after interview, and who discussed every topic that current affairs presented to him. But on the subject of his health, silence. He was wary of doctors and changed several of them. Not because he did not consider them up to the task, but because he was convinced – like so many – that one’s own intuition is the best guide to one’s health. For months, there was talk of colds and bronchitis, even when he appeared on television with his IV line clearly visible and obvious breathing difficulties. Admittedly, it was not the infamous ‘gastritis’ of John XXIII, but it came close. Francis revealed his frailty, appearing in a wheelchair and in pain, yet it was precisely in these snapshots that he reaffirmed, at the same time, that despite everything, he still held the reins of power. “One governs with one’s head, not one’s knee,” he replied when asked whether his knee pain was causing him to doubt whether he could continue his pontificate. It was also a clear way of warding off the vultures that are always circling those who are weakened.

Leone, no. He acted pre-emptively: he knew that, as he was due to undergo surgery, the news would spread through newspapers and on television and, above all, in those corridors where gossip has always reigned supreme – amongst soothsayers certain they know what Providence has decreed, and loose tongues who alternate between prophecies about curial appointments (usually always wrong) and medical diagnoses. It is the Pope himself who is speaking, about nodules and their size. There is no room for speculation – at least in his intentions – given that on social media, pseudo-experts have already posted comments regarding the staging of any malignancy in the tissue to be removed, discussing clear or irregular margins, millimetres and centimetres, PET scans and CT scans.

In this climate of extreme transparency, however, it is clear that the Vatican is once again plunged, after just eighteen months, into a climate of uncertainty. It has always been this way: when the Pope is unwell, people’s eyes turn to him with keen interest; the most recent appointments are scrutinised carefully, in an attempt to understand whether those choices hold a clue or a prediction as to what is to come. Francis’s final months, even before his admission to the Gemelli Hospital, were marked by a perpetual pre-Conclave atmosphere. Opposing factions were gauging their strength, considering which ‘candidates’ to promote and which to discredit. Some were driven by the desire to carry forward the Pope’s irreversible reformist drive – a drive born at the ends of the earth – whilst others were motivated by the opposite intention: to halt it and turn back, or at the very least to restore order. Leo XIV, a methodical man who ponders matters thoroughly and at length before acting, knows this all too well. He recalls that when John Paul II announced, as he himself had done at the Angelus, that he was to be admitted to hospital for serious medical tests, a very long Conclave began which would only materialise much later, more than a decade afterwards.

The Pope’s hospitalisation will entail some inevitable changes to the schedule. The Mass marking the conclusion of the meeting on the tenth anniversary of Amoris laetitia will be presided over by the new dean, Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle. Father Giacomo Costa, one of the organisers of this meeting, explained that “the Holy Father has asked that the summary report not be published, as he wished to hear it and have his say on the matter. He reserves the right to receive it and, once he has been discharged from hospital’, to give his views. Meanwhile, the Prefecture of the Papal Household has announced that all audiences are suspended until 20 October.