Earlier this week, two top Vatican officials made a secret visit to see Pope Francis in the hospital. At first, the Vatican said it had no information about the meeting but then confirmed it, explaining the two prelates had come to secure the pope’s signature to move forward on assembling cardinals to approve new saints.
Veterans of decades of Vatican intrigues weren’t buying it.
“Very, very strange,” said Andreas Englisch, a German journalist and author who has covered the Vatican for nearly 40 years, and who said the meeting immediately set off alarm bells because neither of the two officials worked on canonization issues. Stranger still, he said, was that Francis’ predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, announced his resignation at the same meeting of cardinals, called a consistory, that was also discussing the canonization of saints a dozen years ago.
“It’s the wrong guys for the wrong thing,” he said. “It was obvious that something was not as it seemed.”
The visit, the tantalizing echo of the forum of Benedict’s resignation and what some church watchers consider a clunky cover story about what Francis and his aides really discussed, has only fueled speculation that Francis, who has been out of the public eye for nearly two weeks amid terse medical reports about his health crisis, may be weighing resignation.
His supporters shrug it off as idle chatter. The important thing, they say, is to focus on the pope’s health, which the Vatican said on Wednesday evening has shown “a slight further improvement over the past 24 hours.” Francis’s blood tests confirmed an improvement and that a mild kidney insufficiency had subsided. A CT scan of the pope’s chest carried out Tuesday to monitor his pneumonia in both lungs showed a normal progression of the lung inflammation.
“Despite the slight improvement, his prognosis remains guarded,” the Vatican said.
The possibility of resignation is not an option many would have even considered before 2013, when Benedict became the first pontiff to retire in nearly 600 years, changing the perception of the papacy from a lifetime mission to a more earthly calling, subject to political pressures and health assessments when modern medicine can keep patients alive much longer. If Francis were also to resign, he would help normalize what Dante once called “the great refusal,” and divide the church into pre-Benedict and post-Benedict eras.
Whether there is any fire behind this week’s apparent smoke screen of a meeting, or if Francis is even thinking about resigning is unknown to perhaps but a few of his closest allies, and probably not even them. Once again close watchers of the church are left studying shadows on the Vatican walls and Francis’s biography for hints of what he might do.
“As I know him, he wouldn’t want a major degenerative condition to be a distraction from the papacy so it then becomes the focus of everything,” said Austen Ivereigh, the pope’s biographer, who stressed he had no idea of Francis’ plans. “For Francis what is absolutely essential is that he has freedom.”
To that end, planning an upcoming, though notably undated, meeting with Rome’s cardinals about canonizations keeps an open-ended option for Francis, church watchers say, should he decide that his prognosis going forward does not allow him to fulfill his duties as he sees fit. Overcoming his crisis and exiting the phase of fighting for his life could allow the pope to focus more on what he thinks is best for the church.
In the past, Vatican watchers have seen retirement plans in an unexpected move to make new cardinals, or in a visit, like Benedict before him, to an Italian town with a connection to a Medieval pope who called it quits. Last week, one Italian paper reported on what it dubbed an “‘Operation Biden’” to Convince the Pope to Quit ‘For the Good of the Church.’”
Many church observers who have spent years watching Francis doubt that he would quit, especially from the hospital, which would generate all kinds of conspiracies — in a gossipy world highly prone to conspiracies — about whether he was coerced. Mr. Englisch, for example, didn’t necessarily subscribe to the idea that Francis would quit in the same way as Benedict, in a consistory of cardinals about new saints.
“It’s too perfect to be true,” he said. What seemed more likely to him was that even from his hospital bed Francis continued to use unpredictability as a governing style to keep a Vatican bureaucracy he doesn’t trust off balance. “He wants to send a signal,” Mr. Englisch said.
What that signal meant was an open question.
“Did the Pope call a consistory to resume work or to resign?” read a headline on the Catholic news website Aleteia.
Whatever the answer, clerics who want Francis to stay or go have been sending their own signals since the pope entered the hospital 12 days ago.
The talk of resignation was “useless speculation,” Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s secretary of state and the pope’s second-in-command, and one of the officials who visited him apparently to talk about new saints, said in an interview last week with the Corriere della Sera, Italy’s leading daily. “Now we are thinking about the Holy Father’s health, his recovery, his return to the Vatican: these are the only things that matter.”
The Vatican republished those remarks, as well as those by another close adviser to Francis, the Argentine cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández. “It doesn’t make sense that some groups put pressure on the pope to resign,” he told La Nación. “They have done it various times in recent years.”
The resignation parlor game is not a new one at the Vatican, and Francis himself has often taken part.
In 2022, he revealed that, like popes before him, he had written a letter offering his resignation were he to become incapacitated. But it remains unknown what criteria Francis set.
He subsequently told Jesuits in Congo that he didn’t think “resigning popes should become, let’s say, a ‘fashion,’ a normal thing” and added that he believed “the pope’s ministry is ‘ad vitam,’” or for life. “I see no reason why it should not be so.” He later added that the idea of resignation “never entered my mind. For the moment, no.”
But now we are in a different moment. And there are gray areas of church law about who runs the church if a pontiff slips into a coma, or otherwise loses consciousness for a long period. The bar for resignation is that it be tendered “freely and properly manifested,” but it’s not clear when a pope loses that freedom, or whether Francis’s letter would even be valid if he could not freely and properly manifest his resignation.
Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi said last week that “there is no question” that Francis could resign if he lost the ability to have “direct contact, as he loves doing, or to communicate in an immediate, direct, incisive and decisive way.”
Another prelate, Cardinal Jean-Marc Aveline, the archbishop of Marseille, who often appears on lists of potential popes, allowed last week that when it came to retirement, “everything is possible.”
