ROME (AP) — Pope Francis issued a new message from the hospital on Monday as Vatican officials begged him to let his voice be heard after disappearing from public view for over two weeks as he recovers from pneumonia.
Francis, 88, denounced the “progressive irrelevance” of international organizations to combat war as he remained at Rome's Gemelli hospital in stable condition. He was up, had breakfast and was receiving therapies after sleeping “well all night long," the Vatican said.
The Vatican hasn’t released any photos or videos of Francis since before he entered the hospital on Feb. 14 with a complex lung infection. This has become the longest absence of his 12-year papacy.
The Vatican has provided brief, twice-daily medical updates on his condition, and Francis has begun signing off on documents with “From Gemelli Polyclinic” in an indication that he is up and working.
The Vatican has defended Francis’ decision to recover in peace and out of the public eye. But on Monday one of Francis' closest friends at the Vatican, Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, urged him to let his voice be heard, saying the world needs to hear it.
"We need men like him who are truly universal and not only one-sided," Paglia said, speaking after a press conference to launch the annual assembly of his Pontifical Academy for Life, the Vatican's bioethics academy, which has as this year's theme "The End of the World?"
Francis wrote a message to the assembly, dated Feb. 26, in which he lamented that international organizations are increasingly ineffective to combat the threats facing the world and are being undermined by “short-sighted attitudes concerned with protecting particular and national interests.”
It’s a theme he has articulated before. Francis also has repeatedly called for peace between Russia and Ukraine while trying to maintain the Vatican’s traditional diplomatic neutrality, and has tried to achieve a similar balancing act for Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza.
Even a Vatican ambassador not especially close to Francis, Archbishop Georg Gaenswein, said the faithful needed to hear his voice at a time when war is raging in Europe. Gaenswein was Pope Benedict XVI’s longtime secretary, and Francis exiled him to be the Vatican ambassador in the Baltics after he published a memoir in 2023 that was critical of Francis.
“Pope Francis’ voice is of vital importance for all the world because he’s the only authority who speaks of peace, who condemns war, all the wars under way starting with Ukraine," La Repubblica quoted Gaenswein as saying.
Francis was up and receiving therapy Monday after apparently overcoming a respiratory crisis on Friday that sparked fears of a new lung infection. Francis was put on noninvasive mechanical ventilation, a mask that pumps oxygen into the lungs, which doctors often try before resorting to intubation.
Francis no longer needs the mask and has not been intubated. It’s not clear if he has provided any advance directives about the limits of his care if he declines or loses consciousness.
Catholic teaching holds that life must be defended from conception until natural death. It insists that chronically ill patients, including those in vegetative states, must receive "ordinary" care such as hydration and nutrition, but "extraordinary" or disproportionate care can be suspended if it is no longer beneficial or is only prolonging a precarious and painful life.
Francis articulated that to a meeting of Paglia’s bioethics body in 2017, saying there was “no obligation to have recourse in all circumstances to every possible remedy.” He added: “It thus makes possible a decision that is morally qualified as withdrawal of ‘overzealous treatment.’”
Paglia, whose office helps articulate the Catholic Church’s position on end-of-life care, said Francis is like any other Catholic and would follow church teaching if it came to that.
“Today the pope is giving us an extraordinary teaching on fragility,” he added. “Today the pope, not through words but with his body, is reminding all of us, we elderly people to begin with, that we are all fragile and therefore we need to take care of each other.”
Francis' 17-night hospitalization is by no means reaching the papal record that was set during St. John Paul II’s numerous lengthy hospitalizations over a quarter century.
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