Pope Francis set to miss Easter, the church’s most ‘crucial moment’

As Pope Francis starts his fourth week in hospital with pneumonia, the events he is missing are coming in thick and fast.

Nuns and priests pray at the statue of John Paul II outside the Gemelli University Hospital where Pope Francis is being treated. Picture: AFP

As Pope Francis starts his fourth week in hospital with pneumonia, the events he is missing are coming in thick and fast.

He was unable to commemorate Ash Wednesday last week and was absent from a mass for thousands of people on Sunday to mark the Vatican’s jubilee year.

On Saturday doctors said that he was responding to treatment at Gemelli hospital in Rome and showing a “gradual, slight improvement” but said that he was not out of danger.

He missed his fourth Sunday Angelus prayer in St Peter’s Square on Sunday, but sent out his planned speech in which he gave “heartfelt thanks” to the medics treating him during his “prolonged” hospital stay.

Pilgrims are starting to ask what happens if the Catholic Church is without its big star and main attraction at Easter, the most important event in the Vatican’s calendar.

“We need him right now. Who is going to give his speeches and guide prayers?” said Cristina Vinci, 73, after she passed through the Holy Door at the Vatican to obtain a jubilee year indulgence for her sins.

“Easter is the crucial moment for Christianity, when Jesus manifested his divinity with the resurrection. If the Pope is not there it will be a disappointment for pilgrims,” said Marco Politi, a papal biographer.

On Thursday evening, Francis, 88, sent his first audio message to the world from hospital, a brief statement thanking people for their prayers of support, spoken in a faint, breathless voice betraying how ill he is.

“He wanted to show he is pushing on, but it was pretty scary,” Politi said.

From Ash Wednesday, the Church now shifts into Lent to mark the 40 days Jesus spent fasting in the desert before Holy Week arrives, starting with Palm Sunday on April 13 celebrating Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem, where he was greeted by crowds waving palm branches.

Maundy Thursday follows when Jesus washed the feet of his disciples before he was crucified on Good Friday and rose from the dead on Easter Sunday, celebrated this year on April 20.

It is weeks away, but one doctor said Francis would recover slowly, if he makes it.

“The use of antibiotics to tackle the infection in pneumonia usually last two weeks but then you need up to a month to recover,” said Claudio Santini, head of internal medicine at Grassi hospital in Rome.

During his papacy Francis has made headlines on Maundy Thursdays by washing the feet of prison inmates, including Muslims, something he will be unable to do if he is ill.

“Who will take over those duties, and who will read the Urbi et Orbi benediction the Pope gives on Easter Sunday?” said Sandro Magister, author of the Catholic blog Settimo Cielo.

“The Pope will decide and on Easter Sunday it will probably be the Vatican secretary of state, Pietro Parolin.”

Alberto Melloni, a religious historian, compared the scenario to the “anxious” Easter of 2005 when Pope John Paul II was edging closer to death.

“People will be focused on the conclave that will follow Francis’s death,” he said. The nightly prayers for the Pope in St Peter’s Square last week already felt “very conclave” because they were each led by a different cardinal, he added.

As John Paul watched on television in 2005, his doctrinal chief, the German cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, led prayers on Good Friday during the Stations of the Cross, the event at the Colosseum in Rome recalling Jesus’ crucifixion.

Ratzinger’s damning talk of “filth” inside the Church is thought to have raised his profile and helped win him election as Pope Benedict XVI that year after John Paul’s death in April.

But as the possibility increases that Easter appearances by cardinals standing in for Francis will be a way to boost their papal prospects, Politi urged caution. “Before he resigned in 2013, Benedict praised the Italian cardinal Angelo Scola, but it didn’t do him any good, he wasn’t elected pope,” he said.

THE TIMES