Well-wishers who gathered in the dark to pray for Pope Francis on Thursday evening in St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City heard his voice for the first time since the leader of the Catholic world was hospitalized almost three weeks ago. In a brief recording, Francis thanked them for their prayers.
“May God bless you, and may the Virgin protect you,” he said in Spanish. He sounded fragile and tired.
Francis has not been seen in public since he was hospitalized on Feb. 14. As his illness has stretched on, prospects for his full recovery have dimmed for many Catholics. At the same time, the contours of his convalescence have taken on a familiar rhythm for anyone who has sat by the bedside of an ailing loved one, or waited anxiously for news from miles away.
It is a period of waiting and prayer, but also of Googling new medical terms and checking one’s phone too often for updates from the designated family point person. Medical minutiae distract from bigger thoughts about the unbearable unknown.
In this case, the intimate vigil is playing out on a global stage, with the world’s most powerful Christian as the fading, frail, central character.
The bulletins from the Vatican have typically arrived twice daily in the three weeks since Francis entered Gemelli Hospital in Rome. Because of the time difference between Italy and the United States, where Pope Francis enjoys widespread popularity, there is new information waiting for Americans when they wake up. (On Thursday afternoon, the Vatican said there would be no further new updates until Saturday because of the “stability of the clinical picture.”)
Sometimes the updates are simple — “The pope slept well” — and sometimes they are remarkably detailed, with mentions of high-flow oxygen therapy, hemodynamic parameters and once, memorably, “an episode of vomiting with inhalation.”
“It’s almost too much information in terms of the privacy of the pope,” said the Rev. Francis J. Hoffman, host of the national radio program Family Rosary Across America. “It would probably be against HIPAA laws in this country, but people want to know because they love him, just like you want to know if your parents are in the hospital.”
Father Hoffman, a priest known to his radio audience as “Father Rocky,” prays the rosary live on his program every night, and takes prayer requests from his audience. Lately, children in particular have been calling in to pray for the pope.
“I pray for Pope Francis and I thank God that my grandma is back home out of the hospital,” a 9-year-old caller from Tampa, Fla., named Elizabeth said on the program last week.
“If all the 9-year-olds out there prayed for Pope Francis I bet he’d get better in a hurry,” Father Hoffman reassured her, mentioning the nightly gatherings in St. Peter’s Square to pray for Francis’s strength and healing.
Then, of course, there was the possibility that Francis’s story would not end in healing. He remained in the hospital on Ash Wednesday, a day in the Christian liturgical calendar that serves as a reminder of human mortality. Around the world, priests smudge crosses of ash on parishioners’ foreheads, telling them, “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
On Wednesday, the Vatican reported that “the Holy Father participated in the rite of blessing of the Holy Ashes that were imposed on him by the celebrant.” He then received the Eucharist, as he has almost daily since being hospitalized.
At an Ash Wednesday mass in Rome, a cardinal read aloud a homily prepared for the occasion by Francis: “Despite the masks we wear and the cleverly crafted ploys meant to distract us, the ashes remind us of who we are,” he wrote. “This is good for us.”
Charles Camosy, a professor of bioethics at the Creighton University School of Medicine, has been pondering how the confluence of Ash Wednesday and Francis’s illness has given Catholics and others a reason to contemplate the meaning of a “good death”: as the culmination of a life lived in community, and wide open to the hard fact that every life on Earth ends in death.
“Finitude in some ways gives meaning to our lives,” he said. “We have a limited time here and we need to live our lives with that in mind.”
Others noted that the way one approaches illness and death can shed new light on the person’s character. Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the pope’s representative to the United States, observed in a homily on Sunday that two deceptively simple phrases recurred in the Vatican’s updates on Francis’s health: “He remains in good spirits” and “He resumed his work.”
In Washington, Sister Constance Veit checks her phone for updates on Pope Francis’s health when she wakes up each morning, and each night before she goes to bed.
Sister Constance, 62, was in her 20s when she joined the Little Sisters of the Poor, a group of nuns whose mission is to care for the elderly poor. She has spent her life caring for the frail and dying, often present in their final days and hours.
Now she is watching from afar as the head of her church proceeds through the same course of illness and decline that she has watched up close for years.
“I’m praying just like other Catholic for his healing if it be God’s will,” she said. “But I feel at the same time that he’s well prepared for passing through that door.”
She has been drawing comfort from Francis’s own words about aging, frailty and death. His attention to the elderly was apparent from the start. In one of his first public appearances as pope, at a large gathering of young people in Brazil in 2013, he exhorted the audience to honor their grandparents and “thank them for the ongoing witness of their wisdom.”
John Paul II was called the “Pope of Youth” because of his rapport with young people, Sister Constance recalled. “For me, Francis has been the pope of the elderly, in the care he has shown and the attention he drew to them,” she said. “I will always be grateful to him and love him for that.”