The Vatican’s Holy Year has proceeded without Pope Francis as he continues his recovery from double pneumonia on a weekend dedicated to the Catholic Church’s volunteers.
“The night passed quietly, the pope is resting,” the Vatican said in its early morning update.
The 88-year-old pope, who has chronic lung disease and had a part of one lung removed as a young man, enters his fourth week at Rome’s Gemelli hospital along with his condition stabilised following a number of bouts of acute respiratory crises.
On Friday, the Vatican said Francis spent 20 minutes within the Gemelli hospital chapel, praying and doing a little work in between rest and respiratory and physical therapy.
Another medical update is predicted afterward Saturday.
In his absence, the Vatican goes ahead with its Jubilee celebrations, the once-every-quarter-century Holy Year that’s drawing pilgrims from around the globe to Rome.
This weekend, the Holy Year is celebrating volunteers, and plenty of are extending their pilgrimage to wish for Francis outside the Gemelli hospital.
On Sunday, one in every of the cardinals most closely related to Francis’ papacy, Canadian Cardinal Michael Czerny, presides over the Holy Year Mass for volunteers that Francis was presupposed to have celebrated.
Francis has been using high flows of supplemental oxygen to assist him breathe through the day and a noninvasive mechanical ventilation mask at night.
Doctors not involved in his care said after three weeks of acute care within the hospital for double pneumonia, they’d have hoped to have seen improvement.
While he has stabilised, they warned that he was increasingly liable to secondary infections the longer he stays hospitalised. Additionally, Francis had episodes of acute respiratory failure earlier this week and underwent bronchoscopies to suction mucus from his lungs.
“He’s had respiratory failure they usually weren’t in a position to liberate him from the hospital in the primary three weeks. And subsequently I feel you’d say this does look concerning, perhaps more concerning than it did right at the start,” said Dr. Andrew Chadwick, a respiratory and intensive care specialist at Oxford University Hospitals in England.
Dr. Jeffrey Millstein, a clinical assistant professor of internal medicine on the University of Pennsylvania, said it wasn’t shocking that Francis hadn’t improved in three weeks, and that it was encouraging he was in a position to breathe a part of the day with only a nasal tube of high-flow oxygen.
But he said that the pope’s condition definitely was “a precarious, touch and go form of situation” and that recovery, while still possible, could be a protracted process.
Going forward, “I just could be in search of no recent setbacks,” he said. “I feel so long as he’s coping with the present issues and he’s just making incremental progress, that will be great.”
Francis was hospitalised February 14 for what was then just a nasty case of bronchitis. The infection progressed into a fancy respiratory tract infection and double pneumonia that has sidelined Francis for the longest period of his 12-year papacy and raised questions on the longer term.
