Will there be a new pope in the Vatican soon? Pope Francis added fuel to a recent bonfire of rumors about the future of his popes when he announced he would visit the city of L’Aquila in central Italy in August for a dinner initiated by Pope Celestine V, one of the few popes to resign before Pope Benedict XVI resigned in 2013.
The Italian and Catholic media are full of unconfirmed speculation that 85-year-old Francis may be following Benedict, given his heightened mobility problems that have forced him to use a wheelchair in the past month, including an injury to his right knee ligament that makes it difficult for him to walk. He told his close friends that he did not intend to undergo surgery after the previous time he underwent colon surgery he experienced a severe reaction to the anesthesia. One of his relatives said rumors of his resignation were “optical illusions”.
Despite this, these rumors gained traction last week when Francis announced a consistory to create 21 new cardinals scheduled for August 27 and announced he would host two days of talks the following week to brief the cardinals on his latest envoy to reform the Vatican bureaucracy. All of which caused Saturday’s routine announcement of a pastoral visit to L’Aquila to carry more speculative weight than it could have otherwise.
The notable timing was: the Vatican and the rest of Italy are usually on holiday from August to mid-September, with everything but a vital business closed. A call to a central consistory in late August to create new cardinals, a gathering of churchmen for two days of talks on the implementation of his reform and a symbolically pastoral visit symbolically indicates that Francis has extraordinary matters in mind.
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The Basilica of L’Aquila hosts the tomb of Celestine V, a monk who resigned after five months in 1294, stunned by the work. In 2009, Benedict visited L’Aquila, which was recently destroyed in an earthquake and prayed near Celestine’s grave. No one then appreciated the meaning of the gesture. But four years later, the 85-year-old Benedict will follow in the footsteps of Celestine and resign, saying he no longer has the body and mind strength to continue the pope’s toughness.
The Vatican announced on Saturday that Francis would visit L’Aquila to celebrate Mass on August 28 and open the “Holy Door” in the basilica that hosts Celestine’s tomb. The timing is in line with the L’Aquila Church’s Passover celebration, created by Celestine in the Pope’s Taurus. No pope has traveled to Lacilla since to close the annual holiday, which celebrates the sacrament of forgiveness so dear to Francis, noted L’Aquila’s current archbishop, Cardinal Giuseppe Petrucci.
“We hope that all the people, especially those affected by internal conflicts and disputes, may (come) and find the path of solidarity and peace,” he said in a statement announcing the visit. Francis praised Benedict’s decision to retire as “opening the door” for future popes to do the same, and he originally envisioned a short pope of two to five years.
Nine years later, Francis has shown no signs of wanting to retire, and has big projects still on the horizon. In addition to the upcoming trips this year to the Congo, South Sudan, Canada and Kazakhstan, in 2023 he scheduled a major meeting of bishops around the world to discuss the increasing decentralization of the Catholic Church as well as the continued implementation of his reforms.
This week, one of his closest advisers and friends, Honduran Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Mardiaga, said talk of the pope’s resignation or the end of Pope Francis was unfounded. “I think these are optical illusions, brain illusions,” Mardiaga told Religion Digital, a Catholic website in Spanish.
Christopher Bellito, a church historian at Cain University in New Jersey, noted that most Vatican viewers expect Francis to eventually resign, but not before Benedict dies. The 95-year-old retired pope is physically frail but still alert and occasionally receives visitors at his home in the Vatican Gardens.
“He will not be surrounded by two former popes,” Balito said in an email. Referring to Francis’s planned visit to L’Aquila, he suggested not reading it too much, noting that Benedict’s 2009 gesture was missed by most everyone.
“I do not remember many stories at the time that said Benedict’s visit in 2009 made us think he was about to resign,” he said, suggesting that Francis’s pastoral visit to L’Aquila might be just that: a pastoral visit.