Earlier this week, two top Vatican officials made a secret visit to see Pope Francis in the hospital. At first, the Vatican said it had no information about the meeting but then confirmed it, explaining the two prelates had come to secure the pope’s signature to move forward on assembling cardinals to approve new saints.
Veterans of decades of Vatican intrigues weren’t buying it.
“Very, very strange,” said Andreas Englisch, a German journalist and author who has covered the Vatican for nearly 40 years, and who said the meeting immediately set off alarm bells because neither of the two officials worked on canonization issues. Stranger still, he said, was that Francis’ predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, announced his resignation at the same meeting of cardinals, called a consistory, that was also discussing the canonization of saints a dozen years ago.
“It’s the wrong guys for the wrong thing,” he said. “It was obvious that something was not as it seemed.”
The visit, the tantalizing echo of the forum of Benedict’s resignation and what some church watchers consider a clunky cover story about what Francis and his aides really discussed, has only fueled speculation that Francis, who has been out of the public eye for nearly two weeks amid terse medical reports about his health crisis, may be weighing resignation.
His supporters shrug it off as idle chatter. The important thing, they say, is to focus on the pope’s health, which the Vatican said on Wednesday evening has shown “a slight further improvement over the past 24 hours.” Francis’s blood tests confirmed an improvement and that a mild kidney insufficiency had subsided. A CT scan of the pope’s chest carried out Tuesday to monitor his pneumonia in both lungs showed a normal progression of the lung inflammation.
“Despite the slight improvement, his prognosis remains guarded,” the Vatican said.
The possibility of resignation is not an option many would have even considered before 2013, when Benedict became the first pontiff to retire in nearly 600 years, changing the perception of the papacy from a lifetime mission to a more earthly calling, subject to political pressures and health assessments when modern medicine can keep patients alive much longer. If Francis were also to resign, he would help normalize what Dante once called “the great refusal,” and divide the church into pre-Benedict and post-Benedict eras.