The Vatican continued with his celebrations of the Holy Year without the Pope on Saturday, while Pope Francis fought against pneumonia and a complex respiratory infection that doctors say it remains tactile and will keep it hospitalized for at least another week.
Francis slept very well during the night, Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni said in a brief early update on Saturday.
But doctors have warned that the main threat facing Francis, 88, would be the Start of sepsisA serious blood infection that can happen as a complication of pneumonia. Until Friday, there was no evidence of sepsis, and Francis was responding to the various drugs he is taking, said the Pope's medical team in his first in -depth update about the Pope's condition.
“It is not out of danger,” said his personal doctor, Dr. Luigi Carbone. “So, like all fragile patients, I say they are always on the golden scale: in other words, very little is needed to unbalance.”
Francis, who has chronic lung disease, was admitted to the Gemelli hospital on February 14 after a The episode of bronchitis worsened.
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The doctors first diagnosed the Complex infection of viral, bacterial and fungal tract and then the beginning of pneumonia in both lungs. They prescribed “absolute rest” and a combination of cortisone and antibiotics, together with supplementary oxygen when you need it.
Carbone, who together with Francis's personal nurse Massimiliano Strappetti The care organized for him in the Vatican, acknowledged that he had insisted on staying in the Vatican to work, even after he was sick, “due to institutional and private commitments.” He was treated by an infectious cardiologist and specialist, in addition to his personal medical team before being hospitalized.
Dr. Sergio Alfieri, head of Medicine and Surgery at the Gemelli Hospital in Rome, said that the greatest threat facing Francisco was that some of the germs that are currently in their respiratory system pass to the blood torrent, causing sepsis. Sepsis can lead to organic insufficiency and death.
“The sepsis, with its respiratory problems and its age, would be really difficult to leave,” Alfieri said a press conference on Friday in Gemelli. “The English say 'touching the wood', we say 'touch of iron'. They all touch what they want,” he said as he touched the microphone. “But this is the real risk in these cases: that these germs pass to the blood torrent.”
“He knows he is in danger,” Alfieri added. “And he told us to transmit that.”
The deacons, meanwhile, gathered in the Vatican for their special weekend of the jubilee. Francis became ill at the beginning of the Holy Year of the VaticanThe celebration of Catholicism of a century of each. This weekend, Francis was supposed to celebrate deacons, a ministry in the church that precedes the ordination to the priesthood.
Instead, the organizer of the Holy Year will celebrate Sunday Mass, said the Vatican. And for the second consecutive weekend, Francis was expected to jump his traditional blessing from Sunday at noon, which he could have delivered from Gemelli if he were up to it.
“Look, even though it is not (physically) here, we know it is here,” said Luis Arnaldo López Quirindongo, a deacon of Ponce, Puerto Rico who was in the Vatican on Saturday for the celebration of the jubilee. “It is recovering, but it is in our hearts and is accompanying us because our prayers and their go together.”
Beyond that, doctors have said that Francis's recovery will take time and that, independently, he will still have to live with his chronic respiratory problems in the Vatican.
“You have to overcome this infection and we all hope you overcome it,” said Alfieri. “But the fact is that all doors are open.”
& Copy 2025 the Canadian press