Doctors recommended that Pope Francis rest and recuperate for two months, with no meetings with large groups
ROME — Immediately before leaving Rome’s Gemelli hospital after more than five weeks of treatment for breathing difficulties, double pneumonia and infections, Pope Francis greeted hundreds of people who gathered outside the hospital March 23.
With a very weak voice, Pope Francis thanked the crowd, waving his hands and giving a thumbs up.
An aide had pushed Pope Francis in his wheelchair onto the balcony overlooking the square outside the hospital. Some 600 people had gathered at the hospital, including Rome’s Mayor Roberto Gualtieri. Hundreds of people also gathered in front of video screens in St. Peter’s Square to see the pope for the first time since he was hospitalized Feb. 14.
The pope left the hospital almost immediately after his appearance on the balcony.
The motorcycle police leading the pope’s motorcade turned onto the street leading to the Vatican entrance closest to his residence and then turned around. Rather than go directly home, Pope Francis was driven through the center of Rome to the Basilica of St. Mary Major where he has prayed before and after every foreign trip and after his two previous hospitalizations for abdominal surgery.
Pope Francis did not go into the church but left a bouquet of flowers to be placed on the altar under the Marian icon “Salus Populi Romani” or “Health of the Roman People.”
Television footage of the pope, seated in the front seat of a white Fiat, showed he was using oxygen through a nasal tube.
Just before the 88-year-old pope had come out on the hospital balcony, the Vatican released a text he had prepared for the midday Angelus prayer.
The pope’s message focused on the day’s Gospel reading of the parable of the fig tree from Luke 13:1-9, in which a gardener asks a landowner to allow him to spare a fig tree that had not borne fruit for three years; the gardener asks to be given a year to fertilize and care for the tree in the hope that it would bear fruit in the future.
“The patient gardener is the Lord, who thoughtfully works the soil of our lives and waits confidently for our return to Him,” the pope wrote.
“In this long period of hospitalization, I have experienced the Lord’s patience, which I also see reflected in the tireless solicitude of the doctors and health care workers, as well as in the in the attention and hopes of the family members of the sick,” who also are in the Gemelli, he wrote.
But, like the other messages he released from the hospital on Sundays, the pope also urged prayers for peace and commented on current events.
“I was saddened by the resumption of heavy Israeli shelling on the Gaza Strip, with so many dead and wounded,” he said. Israel, citing an impasse in negotiations with Hamas militias, began launching aerial attacks on Gaza March 18, ending a ceasefire that had begun in January.
Dr. Sergio Alfieri, head of the medical team treating the pope, had told reporters March 22 in his rooms at the Domus Sanctae Marthae, the pope will continue using oxygen as needed through a nasal tube, will be taking medication to fight a lingering mycosis, a fungal infection, and will be continuing his physical therapy and respiratory therapy.
The doctors have prescribed two months of rest and recuperation and have urged the pope not to meet with large groups during that time. They also said his voice will require time to recover.
Dr. Luigi Carbone, the assistant director of the Vatican health service and a member of the medical team treating the pope at Gemelli hospital, said that other than an oxygen tank, no special equipment would be needed in the pope’s room. He added, though, that the Vatican health service has a doctor and other personnel on duty 24 hours a day.
Even after the pope’s return to the Vatican was announced, the Rosary for him and for all the sick was continuing in St. Peter’s Square each evening.
