Speculating about the Pope’s health

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Feb 21, 2025

During the past week I have carefully followed the latest bulletins—from the Vatican press office and the Gemelli Hospital—about the Pope’s health. I have also read countless media reports based on those bulletins. The differences between those two sources of information has been striking.

The Vatican is—and always has been—stingy with details about a Pontiff’s health. Two factors are at work there, I think. First, there is a very reasonable respect for the Pope’s privacy; no one wants to broadcast the intimate details about his bodily functions. Second, there is a less reasonable, but longstanding, tendency among Vatican officials to insist that the Pope is healthy, notwithstanding clear evidence to the contrary.

Remember how Dr. Joaquin Navarro-Valls, the spokesman for Pope John Paul II, was reprimanded for disclosing that the Pope was suffering from an “extra-pyramidal” disorder? Navarro-Valls was trained as a physician, and the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease were evident to anyone who saw the stiff, labored, shaky movements of that formerly spry and athletic Pontiff. Still it was deemed an offense to mention the disease. An offense against what? I wonder. Against honesty? Certainly not; the diagnosis was accurate. Against papal dignity? No, again; no one thinks less of a man who is obviously fighting a degenerative disease.

Still any announcement that the Pope is failing can excite the very excitable rumor mills around Rome, and so I can understand why Vatican officials do their best to tamp down speculation. This past week, the daily bulletins would tell us that the Pope had rested quietly, and eaten breakfast; that the doctors were treating him for a bronchial infection, and hoping for a positive response. In short the bulletins didn’t tell us much.

On a less serious note, I have been amused by the bulletins from the Vatican press office, which assured us each morning that the Pope had eaten breakfast. Since doctors report that the Pope has not lost his appetite, I assume that he has eaten other meals as well, but they have not been mentioned in the daily bulletins. Is the press office suggesting that eating breakfast, in particular, is a sign of good health? My mother, who taught us that breakfast is “the most important meal of the day,” would approve.

After a few days of those anodyne Vatican bulletins, reports in the mainstream media began to say that the Pope’s condition was worsening. Actually I think it would be more accurate to say that after his first two or three days in the hospital, the Pope’s condition was pretty much the same, but the few details leaking out of the Gemelli complex were revealing that his illness had been, from the outset, more serious than the Vatican wanted to admit.

Double pneumonia is a serious matter, particularly for an 88-year-old man with a record of uncertain physical health. And when doctors announced that the Pope was suffering from a “polymicrobial” infection—that is, multiple different simultaneous infections—it should have been no surprise that he would remain in the hospital longer than the 3-4 days the earliest Vatican estimates had suggested. Still, each day the hospital reported that the Pope’s condition was not deteriorating.

Why, then, did media reports jump to the conclusion that Pope Francis was rapidly failing? Perhaps because journalists are always hoping to break a big story. The Pope’s hospitalization was a big story, of course, but a life-threatening illness would be a much bigger one. So there is a ghoulish sort of competition to be the first to report that the Pope is dying.

That, and the fact that if Pope Francis is nearing the end of his life, journalists have an opportunity to speculate about the papal succession. By late this week, quite a few media outlets had put forward their lists of the likely papabili. (In most cases, those lists showed that the reporters were woefully ignorant about the likely prospects for the conclave.) Thus the spin of the news cycle took us past speculation about the Pope’s health to focus on what might happen after his death—without stopping to ascertain whether his life was in danger.

And then on Thursday, when doctors said that the Pope’s condition was “slightly improved,” a few reporters leapt just as prematurely to the opposite conclusion: that the danger had passed, and the Pope would soon regain full health.

Friday’s briefing at the Gemelli Hospital brought a welcome dose of reality to cool down the overanxious reporters. The Pope’s life is not in immediate danger, the doctors assure us, but he is not out of danger, either. His condition has not grown worse, and that is a good sign. But it could deteriorate quickly, and gravely, if the infection(s) spread. Everything depends on the doctors’ success in finding the right medications to defeat the infections.

Will they succeed? We don’t know. Journalists will always be tempted to speculate. Catholics should be more productively inclined to pray.