At last night’s Rosary for Pope Francis’ health, held in St. Peter’s Square, a surprise audio message from Pope Francis was played. In the 27-second message, Francis’ breathing is labored; a slight hiss, presumably from his oxygen machine, runs through the background. He struggles at one point to get a word out. But his voice is unmistakable and strong enough that, at the end of the message, his final word echoed off the Vatican’s stone façade: “Grazie.”
The voice memo was the first time we have heard directly from Pope Francis since he was hospitalized three weeks ago, and listening to it on my headphones—as I have to countless voice memos from friends and family—I was struck by how openly the pope conveyed his own vulnerability.
In the last few years, particularly when the pope has been sick or has been asked about resigning, much ink has been spilled speculating on how Francis might, or should, approach the final stage of his papacy. Even just in recent memory, we have two very different models: St. John Paul II weathered his long illness publicly, believing, as his longtime confidante and secretary Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz recently said: “One does not get down from the Cross of Christ. Never.” While Cardinal Dziwisz said that John Paul remained lucid and able to govern the church to the end, stories abound about curial officials jockeying for power as the pope’s incapacitation progressed.
Having witnessed the final years of John Paul II up close, Pope Benedict XVI made the stunning decision to break with centuries of tradition and resign, saying that he was no longer capable of fulfilling the position’s demands. Benedict lived almost another decade as pope emeritus, residing in a quiet monastery on the Vatican grounds. While he made a few public statements, some of which seemed to be manipulated by those hoping to pit him against the current pope, his decision to resign allowed the church to continue its operations, largely bypassing the drama and power vacuum that he knew would likely emerge as he grew frail. Benedict’s epochal decision to resign also cemented him in church history as a model of humility.
Early in his papacy, Francis often praised Benedict’s decision, saying it opened a door for other popes to resign as well—comments that, naturally, sparked speculation that Francis himself might one day follow suit. Gradually, though, he spoke less and less about the possibility, instead saying to those closest to him that he believed his election was for life. While he did not exclude the possibility of resignation entirely—he filed a signed resignation letter with the Vatican’s secretary of state to be used in the event that he became unable to govern—he seems to have committed to sticking it out. That determination is now being tested, and Francis’ approach in these weeks reveals in further depth his understanding of the papacy.
John Paul II lived his final days in an undeniably visible way, even making an appearance at his apartment window for the usual Wednesday audience before he died on a Saturday. Although unable to speak (he was handed a microphone but could only manage a small noise before it was taken away again), even at that last appearance, the Polish pope made his large, sweeping gestures of blessing. As the Dutch Vatican reporter Hendro Munsterman recently said, “People came to Rome to see John Paul II; they came to Rome to listen to Benedict XVI, and they come to Rome to touch Pope Francis.” After John Paul’s booming voice faded, he maintained an unprecedented level of visibility, understanding that the image of a suffering pope could testify to a suffering Christ.
Benedict’s resignation revealed his own rational approach to the papacy, as longtime Vaticanist John Thavis recently explained to me. He understood the papacy as “an office that is held and that can be set aside, and it’s the office of the pope, not the person of the pope, that is important.”
Francis’ approach, up to now, has been one of closeness to the people. (To revisit Mr. Munsterman: “They come to Rome to touch Pope Francis.”) In these days of his hospitalization, this approach has taken the form of an unprecedented level of transparency regarding his health. At the pope’s own request, twice-daily briefings on his health have been published by the Vatican. He also asked his doctors to hold a press conference on his clinical condition once he had been in the hospital for a week, and Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni revealed today that the idea for the voice memo had also come from the pope. It is typical of his style of closeness that he chose a rather intimate medium—a voice memo, which is well on its way to replacing text messages as the preferred communication method of many Italians, and which cannot conceal weakness the way a text can—to reach out to those praying for him.
It is difficult to overstate how drastically Francis has changed the Vatican’s communication around his illness. Vatican-watchers have long had reason to be skeptical about any word from the Vatican about the pope’s health: As CNN’s Christopher Lamb pointed out recently: “In 1914, the Vatican newspaper criticized commentators for saying Pius X had a cold. 24 hours later, he was dead.” This general lack of transparency led to the oft-quoted saying, “A pope is never sick until he’s dead.” Even in the Francis papacy, communication around the pope’s health has not always been entirely transparent; in this hospitalization, though, we have received even, as Mr. Lamb said, “gory” details, like last Friday, when doctors said that Francis had inhaled some of his own vomit during a respiratory attack.
While many commentators have interpreted this transparency as an effort by the pope and Vatican media to counter mis- and disinformation about the pope’s health, Francis’ own words seem to reveal something of the John Paul II approach. In his message for last Sunday’s Angelus, Francis wrote, “I thank God for giving me the opportunity to share in body and spirit the condition of so many sick and suffering people”—those who, earlier in his papacy, Francis referred to as the discarded of society, those who suffer in silence, victims of a “throwaway culture.”
Just as John Paul’s and Benedict’s final days revealed their understandings of the papacy—John Paul’s as a visible testament to Christ; Benedict’s as a humble and rational man fulfilling a role more important than himself—Francis’ illness has revealed him once again as the world’s parish priest, suffering close to his people, not concealing his weakness but using it to draw attention to those who are so often forgotten.
