In the middle of the fight for the succession, Francisco said that he could have died: “A little more and I did not count it”

He Pope Francis confessed that he feared being close to death when he was hospitalized in Rome, where he was rushed for bronchitis, a hospitalization that raised questions about the future of his papacy, and fueled rumors and criticism from opponents, who long for a new leader.

“A little more and I didn’t count it. I lost consciousness. I had a very bad time”said the pontiff, realizing for the first time that he fainted at the time of his admission to the Gemelli, where he was taken in an ambulance on March 30.

He told this in a phone call to computer scientist Michele Ferri, brother of Andrea, the merchant shot dead in Pesaro in June 2013 by one of his employees for the purpose of robbery and whom Francisco never stopped calling.

Michele Ferri, 52, recounted the Pope’s words when speaking to the newspaper The Rest of the Pugfrom the Italian town of Pesaro. He said he heard the Pope’s voice resounding and decisive as he told him: “I’m still alive” though “tired.”

Francis, who suffers from chronic health problems, was admitted on March 31 in the apartment reserved for the popes on the tenth floor of the Gemelli University Hospital in Rome.

Francis, 86, was discharged on April 1 and returned to the Vatican to prepare for the Holy Week celebrations. “I’m still alive,” he said

“I told him: you gave us a good scare!” Michele recounted, and continued: “He explained to me that he had arrived unconscious at the hospital.” The Pope explained: “A few more hours were enough and I don’t know if I was counting it“.

Francis, 86, was discharged on April 1 and returned to the Vatican to prepare for the Holy Week celebrations. “I’m still alive,” the Argentine pontiff joked to the faithful and journalists gathered outside the Gemelli hospital in Rome.

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“I am reminded of something that an old man once said to me, a man older than me, when faced with a situation like this: ‘I, father, do not know death but I have seen it coming… It is ugly, Hey!'”counted.

But upon returning to the Vatican, Francis found himself embroiled in an apparent cloud of conspiracies around his successionwith the most conservative sectors openly challenging the Pope, whom they accuse of undermining doctrinal teachings with his outspokenness, by calling for a more tolerant church.

The head of the Catholic Church had already been hospitalized for ten days at the Gemelli hospital in July 2021, for a colon operation. He acknowledged that this intervention left him “aftermath” due to anesthesia and that for this reason he gave up knee surgery.

In July 2022 he said he could “step aside”, but in February he said that the resignation of a pope “should not become a fad” and that such an idea was “not on his agenda at the moment”.

For Robert Mickens, editor of the religious newspaper La Croix InternationalFrancisco’s fragile health “gave oxygen” to those who seek to present him as a weak person and expect him to follow the example of his predecessor, Benedict XVIthat when he recognized that his physical and mental forces were not enough, he resigned and retired.

Francisco, who has a series of physical problems and uses a wheelchair, has been very ambivalent in recent years on the subject of his resignation: he has sometimes said that he would resign if he did not feel capable of doing his job, but this year he said abdication was not on his agenda.

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Said He doesn’t want resignations by a head of the Catholic Church to become the norm, but he left open the possibility of following in Benedict’s footsteps and even described what retirement would look like for him, saying he would live in Rome, possibly as a mere priest and that he would not wear the papal white cassock.

But his last hospitalization, according to Massimo Franco, Vatican expert on the Italian diary Corriere della Seracaused a “feverish agitation“both among his allies and among the pope’s critics: “Speculations about the future of the pontificate are now less theoretical,” he wrote.

The vaticanista Iacopo Scaramuzzi believes that some ultra-conservative enemies of Francis feed the rumors through an old tactic: using health as a battle tool and “inflate partially true news or make it up entirely“.

Last January, in statements to the Roman newspaper The printa cardinal said that the conservative faction is preparing to act against the pontiff: “The secret plan will be formulated in several axes and phases, but it will have one objective: to put the pontificate under such stress that Francis will have to resign,” he said.

“Francis’s opponents know that at this moment they are a minority, that they will need time both to gain a consensus and to weaken it,” he said.

The pontiff is clearly aware of what happens every time he falls ill. And in July 2021, after being hospitalized for 10 days at the Gemelli hospital, he jokingly said that “some people wanted me dead” and that several cardinals were already ready to replace him with a conclave.

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