By CNA Staff
Pope Francis is being treated with antibiotics intravenously and has postponed some of his meetings this week as he recovers from a “mild flu,” according to the Vatican.
A scan conducted this weekend at a Rome hospital “ruled out pneumonia, but showed an inflammation of the lungs that caused breathing,” Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni said Nov. 27.
Francis, who turns 87 next month, has spent much of the past decade as pope exercising but has had to deal with several painful fitness disorders in recent years.
Here is a timeline of Pope Francis’ concerns about his health:
A bout of sciatica pain in the final days of 2020 prevents Pope Francis from presiding over Vatican liturgies on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day.
Francisco has been suffering from sciatica for several years; he spoke about it at a press conference on a flight back to Brazil in July 2013.
“Sciatica is very painful, very painful! I wish it on anyone,” he said of the condition, which starts in the lower back and can cause pain in the back of the thigh and leg up to the foot.
Pope Francis cancels 3 more public appearances at the end of the month due to sciatic nerve pain.
A colon took the Pope to the hospital on July 4.
Pope Francis undergoes surgery to relieve colon stenosis through diverticulitis. The three-hour surgery includes a left hemicolectomy, which is the removal of a portion of the colon.
The pope has spent 11 days in Rome’s Gemelli hospital since the operation.
Pope Francis shares that he was having problems with his knee.
“Sorry if I still do, but my leg hurts today. . . It hurts, it hurts if I’m standing,” the pope told reporters at the Jerusalem-based Christian Media Center on Jan. 17.
Francis tells the crowd at his general audience that the explanation he can’t receive pilgrims as usual is because of a “temporary challenge in my right leg,” an inflammation of the knee ligament.
Pope Francis cancels two public events at the end of February due to knee pain and doctors’ rest orders.
In the month that follows, he receives help going up and down stairs but continues to walk and stand without assistance.
During his trip to Malta, Pope Francis uses an elevator to disembark from the papal plane. A special elevator has also been installed at St. Paul’s Basilica of Malta in Rabat so that Francis can make a stopover and pray in the crypt without having to climb the stairs.
On the return flight on April 3, Francis tells journalists: “My health is a bit fickle, I have this knee problem that brings out problems with walking.”
During the Good Friday service at the Vatican, the pope prostrates himself before the altar as he has done in the past.
He also does not celebrate the Easter Vigil Mass on April 16, nor does he participate in the procession of the paschal candle, but he sits in front of the congregation in a white chair.
On April 22 and 26, Francis’ schedule is flexible for medical examinations and resting his knee. The next day, the pope told pilgrims at his general audience that his knee had long prevented him from status.
Pope Francis also comes out in the popemobile as he greets pilgrims in St. Peter’s Square.
On April 30, he says, his doctor ordered him to walk.
The pope says at the beginning of the month that he will undergo a medical procedure on his knee, “an intervention with infiltrations,” by which he may have meant a therapeutic injection, sometimes used to relieve knee pain caused by ligament tears.
Two days later, he uses a wheelchair in public for the first time since his July 2021 colon surgery. Throughout May he continues to use the wheelchair and avoids most standing and walking.
Francis also undergoes more than two hours of knee rehabilitation each day, according to an Argentine archbishop close to the pontiff.
The remedy “is yielding results,” then-Archbishop Victor Manuel Fernandez wrote on Twitter on May 14 after a personal meeting with Francis.
Other than his knee, “he’s better than ever,” Fernández adds.
Earlier, Lebanon’s tourism minister said the papal visit to the country in June would have been postponed due to the pope’s health.
The pope stands for long periods as he celebrates Mass May 15 in St. Peter’s Square. Then, a seminarian from Mexico captures a moment of levity between the pilgrims and the pope as he waves to them from the popemobile. Someone thanks the pope for being attentive at Mass, despite his knee pain, to which Francis responds, “Do you know what I want for my knee?A little tequila.
In early June, the Vatican postponed Pope Francis’ planned stopover in the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan for health reasons. The vacation, scheduled for July 2-7, was postponed “at the request of his doctors and so as not to jeopardize the effects of the treatment he is receiving on his knee,” according to the Vatican.
Less than a week later, the Vatican announces that Pope Francis will not preside over the June 16 Corpus Christi Mass because of his knee problems and “the specific liturgical needs of the celebration.”
Pope Francis comments on his physical condition and speaks of the effects of old age in general terms at his general audience on June 15.
“When you are old, you are no longer in control of your body. One has to learn to choose what to do and what not to do,” the pope says. “The vigor of the body fails and abandons us, even though our heart does not stop yearning. One must then learn to purify desire: Be patient, choose what to ask of the body and of life. When we are old, we cannot do the same things we did when we were young: The body has another pace, and we must listen to the body and accept its limits. We all have them. I too have to use a walking stick now.”
At the end of the month, on June 28, Pope Francis went with a cane to meet the bishops of Brazil and told them: “I can walk for 3 days. “
On Aug. 4, the Vatican announced that Massimiliano Strappetti, a Vatican nurse, had been named “personal assistant” to Pope Francis.
José María Villalón, chief doctor of the Atlético de Madrid football team, is hired to lend a hand to Pope Francis with his knee problems. He says that the pope is “a very typical patient and very stubborn in the sense that there are surgeries that he does ‘we don’t want’ and that ‘we have to offer him more conservative remedies so that he accepts them. ‘”
In an interview via the Associated Press on Jan. 25, Pope Francis announced that his diverticulitis had returned. He stresses that he is in “good health” and that, for his age, he is “normal”.
On Feb. 23, the Vatican announced that Pope Francis had a “bad cold. “The pope distributes copies of his speeches at two morning meetings instead of reading them aloud as usual.
On March 29, the Vatican announced that Pope Francis would have to stay “a few days” in a Rome hospital due to a respiratory infection. That same day it was announced that he was hospitalized for medical examinations scheduled in the past.
On June 7, Pope Francis underwent three-hour abdominal surgery for an incisional hernia.
A team of surgeons heals the tissue and operates on a hernia in the pope’s abdominal wall at the site of a surgical incision made at Rome’s Gemelli Hospital.
The pope is discharged on June 16 after an eight-day stay in the hospital recovering from the operation.
Pope Francis has a “mild flu,” according to the Vatican. The pope canceled his scheduled meetings and went to the hospital on Nov. 25 for precautionary testing.
A CT scan performed at the hospital ruled out pneumonia but showed that the pope suffers from lung inflammation that “causes breathing difficulties,” Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni told reporters Nov. 27.
The pope is treated with antibiotics intravenously as he recovers. A bandage holding in place a cannula for intravenous treatment can be seen on the pope’s right hand as he gives the Angelus blessing from his residence, the Casa Santa Marta, rather than from the usual window of the Apostolic Palace overlooking St. Peter’s Square.
“Today I go to the window because I have this challenge of inflammation of the lungs,” the pope said at the Angelus Nov. 26.
The pope indicated in his Angelus address that he still intends to travel to Dubai from December 1 to 3 to deliver a speech at the United Nations COP28 meteorological convention.
Pope Francis is feeling well enough to attend his scheduled appointment with Paraguay’s president the following day. The Vatican released images of the pope’s assembly with the Paraguayan president in which the pope appears smiling and holding a cane to walk.
This story was originally published on May 21, 2022, and was last updated on November 27, 2023.