Pope Francis has returned to the Vatican on Friday after being discharged from Rome’s Gemelli Hospital where he underwent successful bowel surgery, amid speculation about his papal future due to chronic ailments. It has become extremely difficult for them.
The Pope left the hospital in a wheelchair and spoke to well-wishers and medical staff who gathered outside the entrance to say goodbye.
As he left, he was surrounded by security and helped to a waiting car. The Pope also stopped for a brief visit to a convent before greeting and thanking security guards outside the city’s entrance.
He will pray his weekly Angelus this Sunday and next Wednesday is enough to keep all his appointments except for the general audience.
Medical staff reported that Pope “rested well at night. The clinical course continues to be regular. Hematological examinations are within normal limits.”
As a thank you, he welcomed the entire operating team and visited the children in the pediatric oncology and children’s neurosurgery wards.
The Pope thanked all the health care staff for their professionalism and efforts to alleviate each other’s suffering with gentleness and humanity in addition to medicine.
Pope Francis has faced several health problems during his life, including colon surgery two years ago, having part of a lung removed after struggling with pneumonia in his youth and chronic sciatica. He was in pain.
In the past year, he has used a cane or a wheelchair to manage his knee pain. The Vatican could face a constitutional crisis if Francis remains medically incapacitated for any length of time, since there is no “vice pope” in the Catholic system.
The pope revealed in December that he had arranged for a letter of resignation shortly after his election in 2013 in the event of permanent medical failure. In 2013, Francis’ immediate predecessor, the late Pope Benedict XVI, made the almost unprecedented choice to step down. Stepped down, citing his “modern age” and rocked the Catholic world.
