With a Pope hospitalized, Italian gossip on who could come next

The Pope is so great in everyday Italian life that there are many expressions that make up the light of even a dark event like his death.

“The Pope dies, they make others,” one goes, suggesting how life goes on.

But the one who most often hears, when Pope is ill, maybe the darkest: “The pope is fine until he is dead.”

He made this circles because Pope Francis remains at the Gemelli Roman Hospital, fighting pneumonia and complex respiratory infections.

While the Vatican provided twice a day updates about its condition, and the Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said they “joked the usual” during last week’s visit, all kinds of reports-Istinita and not-excellent about Francis health.

They have taken over their own lives in the time of chat groups, conspiracy theories and internet memos – not to mention the perennial Roman fixation of the Pope and who could inherit it.

AND Conclave effect

Does not help with the Oscar -nominated film Conclave in theaters and made all experts in the secret rules and spectacular dramas involved in the papal elections. Or that Francis recently expanded the deadline for the Dean of the Faculty Cardinal, not to find someone new who will fulfill the key job during the next papal crossing. Or that in 88 years he is one of the oldest pope ever.

Francis still has a way to outlive Pope Leo XIII, who died in 1903 at the age of 93. But he is on his way to the same or surpasses Pope Gregory XII, perhaps best known for his latest Pope to resign as long as Pope Benedict XVI did so, 2013. online.

Francis often said that he would also consider resigning if his health could not continue him, although he had recently said that the Pope’s job was for a living.

Vatican correspondents are usually prepared for the upcoming papal travels at this time of year, but so far no one has been confirmed. Instead, between medical updates, they prepare stories by looking at his life, just in case.

“I think Dictum is” the Pope in line until he is dead “always true,” said Giovanni Maria Vian, former editor of the Vatican newspaper L’Asservatore Romano, who knows how to manage Vatican information. “It is a very Roman way of speech, which on the one hand represents traditional skepticism towards the Romans and Italians, but on the other, information opacity.”

The Vatican did not allow any member of the Francis medical team to appear on the camera or give detailed updates about his health, and his photographs were not published from his hospitalization on February 14th.

Video burns rumors

But in order to understand how much the Pope is in Italian life, you just have to consider the second tradition of religiously observed by the Italians: the annual Sanremo Song Festival, a weekly series on Rai television where viewers vote for their favorite vocals in the rise that perform in Kitchy at night, sometimes, sometimes the demolished competition.

When he was aired last week, he made even more titles than usual, because Francis-ve sick of bronchitis, but he has not yet been at the hospital in the opening in a pre-recorded video, the Sanremo and the first to papacy.

When the popular Italian blog Dagospia then claimed that the video was made almost a year earlier for another event, it broke out near hysteria among the Vatican observers. The obvious deception suggested that Francis’ latest illness was much worse than it seemed, and asked questions about the firmness of the papacy if the old video was published without his knowledge.

As it turned out, Dagospia was wrong. The video was lawful, recent and shot for Sanremo. But it was true that Francis’s bronchitis was really much worse. By the end of the week, it was hospitalized with a lung infection that turned into pneumonia.

The episode is, although it has underfloor Truism that the papacy is a matter of general public knowledge, interest and discussion here, and that it is a guess about Pope’s current health and which could be the next national party.

“I am certainly very, very worried,” said Maurizio di Folco, who was treated at the same hospital at the same hospital at the same hospital. “I wish him a quick recovery and we are deeply praying for him. A very good pope. Great Pope! We hope he will be with us for a long time.”

Conservative critics have weighed

But elsewhere, Francis’ right-wing critics are circulating by alarming by completely one-way-stories about its condition. Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, Francis Nemesis who was excommunicated last year, revived his conspiracy theory about the legitimacy of Francis’ election in 2013, inviting CIA to explore what the conspiracy was a “deep state” to choose it.

Francis knows this dynamics well.

“Some wanted me dead,” he said to the Slovak priests in 2021, speaking of what he learned while he was hospitalized that year because of intestinal surgery. “I know there were even a meeting between priests who thought the pope was worse than what was said. They prepared a conclave.”

It is considered a bad taste to publicly discuss who is up or down in the papal roles of the future conclave, much less to start planning. But in private, Rome was in such a way with such conversations. Taxi drivers talk about passengers, doctors with patients, butchers with customers.

Candidates must be male and baptized Catholic. And although this is not a express request, almost every pontif was a cardinal before they were chosen.

The Pope has selected 120 cardinals who must be under the age of 80 at the time of the previous pope’s death or resignation.

For now, Francis sticks. On Thursday, the Bulletin said that his overall clinical condition “improved slightly” and that his heart works well. He had breakfast sitting in an armchair and worked with assistants.

“There is a greater measure of transparency, but it’s not complete,” said Christopher Bellitto, a professor of church history at Kean University in New Jersey. “Surely everyone with the aging of parents and grandmothers said,” It’s a lung pneumonia “before the Vatican did.”