Pope Francis continued his recovery from double pneumonia on Saturday as the Vatican machinery and Holy Year celebrations marched on without him, this weekend dedicated to the Catholic Church’s volunteers.
The 88-year-old pope, who has chronic lung disease and had part of one lung removed as a young man, entered his fourth week at Rome’s Gemelli hospital with his condition stabilized following a few bouts of acute respiratory crises.
In his absence, the Vatican’s day-to-day operations continued, with Cardinal Pietro Parolin celebrating Mass for a pro-life group in St. Peter’s Basilica. At the start, Parolin delivered a message from the pope from the hospital on the need to protect life, from birth to natural death.
In the message, dated March 5 and addressed to the Movement for Life, which seeks to provide women with alternatives to abortion, Francis encouraged the faithful to promote pro-life activities not just for the unborn, but “for the elderly, no longer independent or the incurably ill.”
Later Saturday, another cardinal closely associated with Francis’ papacy, Canadian Cardinal Michael Czerny, presides over the nightly recitation of prayers for Francis. Czerny then returns on Sunday to celebrate the Holy Year Mass for volunteers that Francis was supposed to have celebrated.
On Friday, Francis spent 20 minutes in the Gemelli hospital chapel, praying and doing some work in between rest and respiratory and physical therapy, the Vatican said. A medical update was expected later Saturday.
Francis has been using high flows of supplemental oxygen to help him breathe during the day and a noninvasive mechanical ventilation mask at night.
Doctors not involved in his care said after three weeks of acute care in the hospital for double pneumonia, they would have hoped to have seen improvement. While he has stabilized, they warned that he was increasingly at risk of secondary infections the longer he remains hospitalized. Additionally, Francis had episodes of acute respiratory failure earlier this week and underwent bronchoscopies to suction mucus from his lungs.
“He’s had respiratory failure and they were not able to liberate him from the hospital in the first three weeks. And therefore I think you’d say this does look concerning, perhaps more concerning than it did right at the beginning,” said Dr. Andrew Chadwick, a respiratory and intensive care specialist at Oxford University Hospitals in England.
Dr. Jeffrey Millstein, a clinical assistant professor of internal medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, said it wasn’t shocking that Francis hadn’t improved in three weeks, and that it was encouraging he was able to breathe part of the day with just a nasal tube of high-flow oxygen.
But he said that the pope’s condition certainly was “a precarious, touch and go kind of situation” and that recovery, while still possible, would be a long process.
Going forward, “I just would be looking for no new setbacks,” he said. “I think as long as he is dealing with the current issues and he’s just making incremental progress, that would be great.”
Francis was hospitalized Feb. 14 for what was then just a bad case of bronchitis. The infection progressed into a complex respiratory tract infection and double pneumonia that has sidelined Francis for the longest period of his 12-year papacy and raised questions about the future.
