“The Pope cares a lot about the church, so it’s clear he put the church first,” his personal doctor, Luigi Carbone, said at the hospital on Friday.
Another of his doctors, Sergio Alfieri, added that Francis “doesn’t hold back because he is enormously generous, so he tired himself out”.
Francis arrives for his weekly general audience in the Paul VI Hall at the Vatican on February 12.Credit: AP
Francis became Pope late in life – he was 76 – and was determined to make the most of it because he suspected that, relatively speaking, he would not hold the position for long. A year into his papacy, he told reporters that he thought he would be pope for two or three years, then “off to the house of the Father”.
That prediction was clearly wrong. Instead, he established a schedule – waking up before 5am and at his desk by 6am to tackle a full day of work – that author Nelson Castro, who wrote The Health of Popes, called “crazy.” Just last September, Francis took the longest and most complicated trip of his tenure: an 11-day, four-country tour in the Asia-Pacific region.
“For Francis, it’s all or nothing,” Catholic commentator and papal biographer Austen Ivereigh said. In Francis’ view, 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 primary concern isn’t to extend his life; his primary concern is to exercise the papal ministry in the way that he believes it must be exercised, which is all in, 100 per cent,” Ivereigh said.
Posing for a photo with nuns on February 5.Credit: AP
“He has a crazy agenda,” another biographer, Argentine journalist Elisabetta Piqué, said. Alongside his official morning schedule, he has a parallel, equally full agenda for the afternoon. “He always says: I’ll have time to rest in the next world,” she said.
Francis had a deep-seated sense of duty that was instilled in him by the boarding school he attended as a child, run by the Salesian religious congregation, and later by the Jesuit order, which he joined in 1958, another biographer, Fabio Marchese Ragona, said.
He said Francis had told him that he had joined the Jesuits “above all for the discipline” and that keeping commitments was drilled into him, as was arriving early for appointments.
Carlo Musso, who worked with Francis on Hope, an autobiography that was published last month, noted: “The word he used most, the exhortation I remember best, is ‘forward’. Even when he was looking back, it was so he could move forward.”
Candles and a photo of Pope Francis are seen in front of the Agostino Gemelli Polyclinic in Rome on Saturday, where the pontiff is being treated.Credit: AP
People who know Francis say he is resistant to taking a break, even when he should because of sciatica, a bad knee or recurrent bronchial woes. As a young man, he had the upper lobe of his right lung removed, and he has suffered bouts of influenza and bronchitis during the winter months.
“He’s so obstinate; he’s a testardo,” Castro, using the Italian word for stubborn, said. And the Pope has admitted to being “a very difficult patient,” he added.
The Pope once told him that he liked to keep his distance from doctors, Castro said, “meaning that he wants to make the decisions” about what he can and cannot do.
Ivereigh said Francis had admitted that one of his “big faults” was obstinacy. “He’s very strong-willed and doesn’t readily listen to suggestions that he cut things back,” he said.
Doctor Sergio Alfieri updates the media on the Pope’s condition on Friday.Credit: AP
Musso pointed out that a few hours before he was taken to hospital, Francis held audiences with the prime minister of the Slovak Republic, the president of CNN and representatives of a charity that works in Puerto Rico. “He has an enormous capacity for work,” he said.
The Pope does not go away for summer holidays, Musso added. That habit, said Piqué, is a source of chagrin for many Vatican employees. His last real holiday was in 1975, Francis himself said in Hope.
John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI summered at the papal residence in Castel Gandolfo, although the former also opted for mountain stays in northern Italy.
A Vatican reporter for Rome daily newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano, Francesco Antonio Grana, said it did not help that Francis surrounded himself with “yes men” who indulged him.
Pope Francis arrives for a Jubilee audience at the Vatican on February 1.Credit: AP
“This hospitalisation could have been avoided” had someone put the brakes on the Pope’s schedule, Grana said. “I prefer a live pope than a pope who died because he kept one more commitment on his agenda,” he said. “With Donald Trump in the White House, the world needs a live and combative pope.”
The same week that he went into hospital, Francis wrote an open letter to bishops in the United States criticising Trump’s policy of mass deportations of immigrants, and he has stood up to Trump on issues such as climate change.
Francis’ workload was not only arduous but also brought him into contact with hundreds of people who could potentially transmit diseases, University of Rome Tor Vergata infectious diseases professor Massimo Andreoni said. “So perhaps he should be more careful when he has a cold or bronchitis and maybe slow down a little and look after himself a little more.”
There are a few signs that the Pope may be ready to slow down.
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Francis was visited in the hospital on Wednesday by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. Milan paper Corriere della Sera wrote that Francis complained to the prime minister: “The doctors said I have to take some time off” and that “I have to be careful with my health, otherwise I go straight to heaven.”
At a news briefing on Friday, Francis’ doctors made clear they would keep him at the hospital as long as he needed treatment that he could only receive there, rather than take him home to his residence in Casa Santa Marta.
“We think it’s prudent,” Sergio Alfieri, one of the Pope’s doctors, said. “If we brought him to Santa Marta, he’d start working like before – we know this.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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