11 hours ago
3
Pope Francis remained in a stable condition on his 20th day in hospital with pneumonia, sitting in an armchair to do some work and receiving communion and an Ash Wednesday cross on his forehead as Catholics around the world marked the beginning of Lent.
In its latest update, the Vatican said the 88-year-old pontiff had not suffered any new respiratory crises and had been given oxygen through a nasal tube. It said that after the Ash Wednesday rites, Francis had set to work and made his usual call to the parish priest of Gaza.
“Given the complexity of the clinical picture, the prognosis remains reserved,” the statement added. It also said Francis would once again sleep with a non-invasive mechanical mask for the night.
The pope has been seriously ill since he was admitted to hospital on 14 February. The Vatican said the two episodes of acute respiratory failure on Monday were caused by “significant accumulation of endobronchial mucus and a consequent bronchospasm”.
Francis also suffered a bronchospasm on Friday that caused him to vomit and inhale vomit. That episode followed a prolonged breathing crisis on 22 February, which required blood transfusions for a low platelet count.
Cardinal Angelo De Donatis stood in for the pontiff at the Ash Wednesday mass at Rome’s Santa Sabina Basilica and read a homily on Francis’s behalf.
“We feel deeply united with him in this moment,” De Donatis said before he began the address. “And we thank him for the offering of his prayer and his suffering for the good of the entire church in all the world.”
In the homily, the pope reflected on the fragility of life – as represented by the ashes – on death, on ideological and environmental pollution, but also on the hope symbolised by Christ’s resurrection.
“Made of ashes and earth, we experience fragility through illness, poverty, and the hardships that can suddenly befall us and our families,” he wrote.
“We also experience it when, in the social and political realities of our time, we find ourselves exposed to the ‘fine dust’ that pollutes our world: ideological opposition, the abuse of power, the re-emergence of old ideologies based on identity that advocate exclusion, the exploitation of the earth’s resources, violence in all its forms and war between peoples.”
Fragility, he added, reminds us of the inescapable “tragedy of death”. No matter how much we try to banish it from our societies, Francis said, “death imposes itself as a reality with which we have to reckon, a sign of the precariousness and brevity of our lives”.
The Associated Press and Agence France-Presse contributed reporting
