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Pope Francis continued on Saturday with his recovery of double pneumonia when the Vatican’s holy year continued without him on a weekend devoted to the volunteers of the Catholic Church.
“The night went by quietly, the pope rested,” said the Vatican’s early morning update.
The 88-year-old Pope, who has chronic lung disease and has removed part of one lung as a young man, entered his fourth week at Rome’s Gemelli Hospital with his condition stabilized after some acute respiratory crises.
In his absence, the Vatican continued with his Jubilee celebrations, the one-time quarter-century Holy year that draws pilgrims from around the world to Rome. This weekend, the holy year of volunteers celebrates, and many expand their pilgrimage to pray for Francis outside Gemelli Hospital.
On Sunday, one of the cardinals most associated with Francis’s papacy, Canadian Cardinal Michael Czerny, is the Holy Year mass for volunteers that Francis was supposed to celebrate.
Francis spent 20 minutes in Gemelli Hospital Chapel on Friday, praying and doing work between rest and respiratory and physical therapy, the Vatican said. A medical update is expected later on Saturday.
Francis uses high flow of supplemental oxygen to help him breathe during the day and at night a non -invasive mechanical ventilation mask.
Doctors who were not involved in his care said that after three weeks of acute care in hospital, they would have hoped for double pneumonia to be improved. As he stabilized, they warned that he was increasingly running the risk of secondary infections, the longer he was hospitalized. In addition, Francis had episodes of acute breathing failure earlier this week and underwent bronchoscopies to suck mucus from his lungs.
“He had breathing failure and they could not free him from the hospital in the first three weeks. And that’s why I think you would say that it looks, perhaps more than it was at the beginning, ‘says Dr. Andrew Chadwick, a specialist in respiratory and intensive care at Oxford University Hospitals in England.
Dr Jeffrey Millstein, a clinical assistant professor of internal medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, said it was not shocking that Francis had not improved over three weeks, and that it was encouraging that he could breathe part of the day with just a nasal tube with high-flow acid.
But he said that the pope’s condition was certainly “an unsafe, touch and a kind of situation” and that recovery, although still possible, would be a long process.
In the future, “I would just be looking for no new setbacks,” he said. “I think as long as he deals with the current issues and he only makes incremental progress, it will be wonderful.”
Francis was admitted to hospital on February 14 for what was just a bad case of bronchitis at the time. The infection advanced to a complicated breathing tract infection and double pneumonia that Francis placed for the longest period of his 12-year-old papacy and raised questions about the future.
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Associated Press Religion cover receives support through the AP’s collaboration with the conversation us, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is only responsible for this content.
