Being in Rome when even taxi drivers and waiters will volunteer updates on the state of the Pope’s health is a strange experience.
One can only imagine what it must have been like for Vatican watchers or residents before the invention of smartphones, X and the 24-hour news cycle.
In 1958 Michael de la Bédoyère, who was then editor of the Herald, found himself in the excruciatingly tricky position of not knowing for sure whether Pope Pius XII was alive or dead when the paper faced its weekly press deadline.
He gambled that he would be dead by the time the paper went on sale in time for Sunday Mass.
De la Bédoyère was proved to be right. Pope Pius’s condition had been gravely worsening all week after two strokes, the first of which had paralyzed him, after which he received the Last Rites.
After the second stroke, his situation was described as beyond hope – hence the editor’s gambit.
There was also at least some confusion as to whether Pope Francis had received the Anointing of the Sick – although it seems impossible that he had not, given how strident he has been in his own teaching about how this sacrament for the seriously unwell is not necessarily a harbinger of imminent death.
A good friend of mine – a walking pilgrimage companion – was anointed after his doctors told him he wouldn’t last the night after his cancer took a bad turn. He lived to tell the tale, and can now march 25 km a day as long as there is the promise of a decently-mixed Negroni at the end.
Inevitably, because of the Year of Jubilee, Rome is full of pilgrims – or tourists, or both. There are longer queues than usual to enter St Peter’s Basilica, and I was cross with myself for not having been organized enough to pre-purchase tickets to the Caravaggio 2025 exhibition at the Palazzo Barberini, which has been organised to coincide with the Jubilee.
Instead, my wife and I visited some of the churches where you can see some of Caravaggio’s masterpieces for free – or at least for the €2 it costs to light up some dark corner. Perhaps it was a blessing to avoid the crowds.
My favourite Caravaggio altarpiece in Rome is his Madonna of the Pilgrims (with their famous dirty feet) in the tucked-away church of Sant’Agostino, near the Piazza Navona.
This church was on the main pilgrimage route of the Via Francigena to St Peter’s Square, where all the pilgrim roads led. It’s just off the Via dei Coronari, the so-called “Road of the Rosaries” where pilgrims picked up their crucifixes and holy water before reaching their destination.
That was before the days when St Peter’s Basilica had its own gift shop selling all kinds of papal wares. I do wonder whether the souvenir-hawkers have begun to hedge their bets, like Michael de la Bédoyère, about when the day will come.
One of the many problems with having a pope so gravely ill for so long is that, as John Allen once wryly observed, it produces a glut of Vatican-related stories that would never normally appear in national papers – most of which have long abandoned having dedicated religious-affairs correspondents.
A tribe of international reporters therefore hangs around restaurants and bars in the Eternal City, waiting for the inevitable but with little to write about until it happens. When they run out of stories, they end up interviewing each other.
The first question that Turkey’s equivalent of the BBC asked me was “Can you tell our viewers who the Pope is?”
Pope Francis’s now-month-long stay in hospital – which has included the 12th anniversary of his election – is still not especially long by other papal standards.
John Paul II spent 155 days in the Gemelli Hospital, including an extended stay after his attempted assassination in 1981. By the entrance is a large white marble statue of him leaning on his papal staff, the base of which has now been turned into a shrine with candles, notes to “Papa Francis” and nuns leading the rosary in all Roman weathers.
Named after the theologian and doctor Agostino Gemelli on land first gifted by Pope Pius XI in 1934, the hospital today is a sprawling modern building outside which pretty young Catholic medical students ask for donations as you walk by. In the lobby is a display of painted model buildings depicting scenes from the gospels, like a giant papier mâché crib.
The global press corps are still camped outside, and outside St Peter’s as well.
Their mood is best described as restless, if not outright bored. At least these days the order of events for electing Pope Francis’s successor is well established – 9 days of mourning, and then a gap of some two weeks before the conclave.
There have been much longer instances of sede vacante: back in 1800 there was a delay of around six months between the death of Pius VI and the election of Pius VII.
Reading about the death of Pius XII in 1958 – in many ways the first modern pope, having been the first to fly in a plane, the first to use a typewriter, the first to visit the USA and the first to use a personal safety razor – brings the changes since into sharp relief.
In the 1958 conclave, which elected Paul VI, there were only 53 cardinals – of whom 51 voted. Of those participating, the vast majority were Italian and back then there had been no non-Italian pope for over 400 years. At the next conclave, depending when it falls, there will be about 135 voting cardinals.
Many of them have been gathering in St Peter’s Square for the nightly rosary for Pope Francis.
On the evening that I went, Laura and I stood in the rain for about 45 minutes while Cardinal “Chito” Tagle – the former Archbishop of Manila, and now a very senior official in the Dicastery for Evangelization – recited the prayers.
The plastic seats normally used for papal masses were covered with thin puddles of water. Others on parade included Cardinal Gerhard Muller, Cardinal Raymond Burke and Sister Raffaella Petrini – who is now in charge of the Vatican Governorate.
Cardinal Tagle led the Sorrowful Mysteries in Italian and Latin from under a covered white pavilion outside the basilica.
The last time I was in the square, for a General Audience last October, a visibly non-mobile Pope Francis was delivered straight to the outdoor altar – brazenly driven up the middle of the steps – in a custom-made, pearl-white new G-Class Mercedes-Benz, which operates like a 4×4 wheelchair.
For papal petrolheads, the new car is an all-electric G580 with EQ technology, and has zero CO2 emissions.
It felt strange for the Holy Father – and his parked-up Popemobile – to be absent from the stage.