During his first foreign trip in 2013, Pope Francis made headlines when he carried his own black leather briefcase as he boarded the Alitalia charter sure for Brazil, since popes never carry bags and until the Nineteen Seventies were themselves carried on thrones.
Asked what was within the bag, Francis joked that it wasn’t the nuclear codes. But he seemed baffled that something as normal as an airplane passenger carrying a briefcase could create such a fuss.
“I even have at all times taken a bag with me when travelling – it’s normal,” he told his first news conference as pope. “We must get used to being normal. The normality of life.”
Over 12 years, Francis has sought that sort of normality for the papacy together with his informal style and disdain for pomp while ensuring that he still wields the awesome power held by Christ’s vicar on Earth and Europe’s last absolute monarch.
The way Francis has managed his five-week hospitalization for pneumonia has followed that very same playbook: He has allowed the general public to follow the very normal ups and downs of an 88-year-old man battling a fancy lung infection through spare but regular medical bulletins, while also continuing to run the 1.3-billion strong Catholic Church.
Franics has stayed on top of things, remotely
In between respiratory crises, prayer and physiotherapy, Francis has appointed over a dozen bishops, approved a handful of latest saints, authorized a three-year extension of his signature reform process and sent off messages private and non-private. Vatican cardinals have stood in for him at events requiring his presence.
That’s not as easy a balancing act because it sounds, since there are few positions of power which can be each as absolute because the papacy and, during times of illness, as seemingly fragile: According to the church’s canon law, the pope possesses “supreme, full, immediate, and universal peculiar power within the church.” He answers to nobody but God, and there isn’t any appeal of his decisions.
And while popes aren’t subject to re-election campaigns or no-confidence votes, they essentially owe their jobs to the 120 men who elected them. While those self same cardinals swear obedience to the pope, they may ultimately select his successor from inside their very own ranks. It’s no surprise then that talk of conclaves, papal contenders and challenges facing a future pope has been a relentless buzz in Rome ever since Francis was admitted to Gemelli hospital Feb. 14.
Francis is well aware that anytime he has gone into the hospital, the plotting has begun for electing the subsequent pope, contributing to a certain lame duck status. “Some wanted me dead,” he said after his 2021 hospitalization, when he learned that secret meetings had already been held to plan the conclave. He knows as well that even before his current hospitalization, an anonymous cardinal had circulated a seven-point memo listing priorities for the subsequent pope to correct the “confusion, division and conflict” sowed by Francis.
But he is not shy about showing weakness
And yet Francis has never been shy about showing his weaknesses, age or infirmities in ways in which seem unthinkable for public figures for whom any sign of fragility can threaten their authority and undermine their agenda.
Within months of being elected, for instance, Francis reached out to an Argentine doctor and journalist, Dr. Nelson Castro, and suggested he write a book concerning the health of popes, himself included.
“My hypothesis is that he wanted initially to point out himself as a human being,” Castro said in an interview. “We are inclined to see popes like saints, but the best way he talked about his diseases showed me, ‘I’m such as you and me, being exposed to diseases.’”
Francis had read and appreciated Castro’s earlier book, “The Sickness of Power,” concerning the ailments which have afflicted Argentina’s leaders and the way power itself had afflicted them. He invited Castro to research and write about past popes and his own case in an identical light.
“The Health of Popes” was published in 2021. Castro said what struck him most was that Francis disclosed not only his physical ailments, but his mental health challenges too: Francis revealed that he had gone to a psychiatrist when he was the Jesuit provincial during Argentina’s military dictatorship within the Nineteen Seventies to assist him address fear and anxiety.
“Pope Francis is a person of power,” Castro said. “Only a person of power, feeling quite sure of himself, would dare to speak about his diseases so openly.”
The balance of strength in weakness could be very Jesuit
For the Rev. John Cecero, who was Jesuit provincial for the northeast United States from 2014-2020, Francis’ willingness to point out his weaknesses while exercising supreme authority is consistent together with his Jesuit training and the biblical teaching of St. Paul that “once I am weak, then I’m strong.”
“A chief virtue on the a part of everyone within the practice of Jesuit authority is humility,” Cecero said in an interview. “On the a part of the person Jesuit (meaning) considering beyond my very own self-interest to the common good.”
“I understand it’s something that drives Francis: that you’ve that very same humility,” he said.
And yet Francis’ critics often complain that he’s authoritarian, that he takes decisions in a vacuum and without regard to the law, and wields power like a “Dictator Pope,” the title of a book written by a traditionalist critic early in Francis’ papacy.
Many recite the joke concerning the way Jesuit superiors exercise power, which is presupposed to be a means of joint discernment between the superior and the underling but, the joke goes, it will probably be anything but: “I discern, you discern, we discern … I determine.”
Those same conservative critics, after all, have been keenly watching Francis’ hospitalization and wondering if the top of his papacy is near.
Even if he’s absent, and even when he has to in the reduction of his public activities going forward, Francis could be very much still in power and leading the church, said Kurt Martens, a canon lawyer at Catholic University of America in Washington D.C.
“We’re used to seeing a pope who’s in all places on a regular basis,” he said. “But do not forget that previously, not that way back, popes would show up only rarely.”
He could also be absent, but he’s still on top of things
Francis’ disappearance from public view has led some to doubt the authenticity of the primary, and to date only photograph of Francis released by the Vatican since his hospitalization. It was shot from behind and showed Francis at prayer in his private hospital chapel, his face hidden.
Avvenire, the newspaper of the Italian bishops’ conference, said the photo was not only real but showed Francis controlling the image that he wants the faithful to have of the papacy and his illness. Francis wants viewers to focus not on the spectacle of a sick pope, but on what should actually matter more to a Catholic anyway.
“If we cannot see his face … what we must take a look at is precisely what he himself is facing: the altar and the crucifix,” Avvenire wrote.
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