Michael W. Higgins is the Basilian Distinguished Fellow of Contemporary Catholic Thought at the University of Toronto’s St. Michael’s College and a senior fellow at Massey College.
Why does the media obsess over the health of old men in white on the Tiber River?
Largely because the death of one pope and the election of another is media catnip, and the world’s attention is guaranteed as these moments unfold. Both the Catholic and the non-Catholic world are held captive to the arcane rituals, panoply, political intrigues and competing personalities – the sheer theatricality of it all – that take place when one Bishop of Rome is replaced by another.
The machinery of coverage is elaborate, hotel bookings and preferred site settings for cameras are arranged by major networks long in advance and obituaries are regularly updated. Perfect media preparedness in action.
This is all germane as Pope Francis has been in and out of the hospital several times recently. This month alone he spent nine days at Rome’s Gemelli University Polyclinic undergoing surgery to repair an abdominal hernia. In March and April, he spent three days there for acute bronchitis, and his chronic sciatica and knee problem have seriously limited his mobility (as we saw clearly during his “penitential pilgrimage” to Canada last summer). In July, 2021, he had 13 inches of his colon removed because of severe diverticulitis.
But certainly, the most threatening challenge to Pope Francis’s health occurred some 60 years ago, when he was in the second year of his seminary training in Buenos Aires. It was Aug. 13, 1957, when he was taken to a hospital with a respiratory infection, resulting in the removal of part of his lung. He spent months struggling to stay alive.
He has spoken candidly with his biographer and occasional collaborator Austen Ivereigh about his 1957 hospitalization in Let Us Dream: The Path to a Better Future, noting that “I have some sense of how people with coronavirus feel as they struggle to breathe on ventilators.” He also learned from that experience a couple of things he would carry into his eventual ministry as a priest: the importance of avoiding cheap consolations with excessive talking and empty clichés. “After my experience, I made the decision, when visiting the sick, to speak as little as possible. I just hold their hands.” And during his time of convalescence when he had considerable time to think and discern, he made the life-shaping decision to enter the Society of Jesus. Ergo, we have a Jesuit pope.
Francis’s various medical ailments are newsworthy, but it is the death of popes that is real news. The papal death watch has moved from the secretive and hyper-solemn to the expansive and accessible. The death in 1963 of John XXIII ushered in a new era of papal passings. Beloved by multitudes, the Peasant Pope was media savvy, and although his pontificate was short – just shy of five years – the impact of his leadership reverberates still. The world gathered in Rome to mourn a celebrity.
His successor, Paul VI, died of a heart attack in the year of the three popes: 1978. His successor, John Paul I, died after less than a month in office and the circumstances surrounding his death have been the subject of hyper-charged conspiracy theories as well as more serious investigations. His successor, John Paul II, the youngest pope in centuries (elected at the age of 58) had a long reign, and his prolonged dying often verged on the lugubrious. Benedict XVI resigned as pope for various reasons, including health concerns, after eight years at the helm. His health actually improved as an Emeritus Pope and he lived for another decade, dying at 95.
Francis is a vibrant 86, if periodically immobilized by chronic but non-life-threatening issues, and gives no indication of diminishing his workload. Papal gendarmes carried boxes of material to his sick bed so he could stay on top of things. No lessening of the papal agenda.
And that has his detractors feeling anxious. It is hard to plan for his successor when he bounces back so quickly from any medical setback. Books have already been published canvassing the wide spectrum of papabile (those cardinals considered electable). The anti-Francis faction in the Catholic hierarchy is desperately looking for a candidate who will right Peter’s Barque after years of a tumultuous papal regime, and they despair over Francis’s remaking of the College of Cardinals, stacking it with men who are in alignment with his vision of the church, thereby assuring a successor who is Francis-friendly.
Francis’s frequent bouncebacks are enough to make a critic of his papacy apoplectic. And that can’t be good for one’s health.