One day after being discharged from the hospital, Pope Francis reappeared this Sunday in St. Peter’s Square in the Vatican to preside over the Palm Sunday mass and silence rumors about an alleged resignation. As he himself had confirmed, the Pontiff did not want to miss the celebration that begins the intense Vatican Holy Week, although his voice was weaker than usual after suffering from bronchitis that forced him to sleep for three days in the hospital. .
Jorge Mario Bergoglio has arrived in the popemobile to the center of the square, at the foot of the obelisk, to bless the branches of the faithful and members of the Roman curia who had carried in procession, remembering the entry of Jesus of Nazareth into Jerusalem. Wearing a white coat, he got out of the car and walked a few steps to the place helped by the cane that he has been using lately for his knee problems, although without a wheelchair.
“I also need Jesus to caress me, to come close to me, and for this reason I go to look for him in the abandoned”, he said during a homily dedicated to the marginalized before the 60,000 people who were waiting for him in the square, according to the calculations of the vatican gendarmerie. “Today there are so many ‘Christ abandoned’. Entire towns exploited and abandoned to their fate; poor people who live at the crossroads of our streets, with whom we dare not meet eyes; immigrants who are no longer faces but numbers; rejected prisoners, people classified as problems,” he lamented, from the heart of San Pedro.
The Pope left the hospital yesterday after three days of treatment with intravenous antibiotics. It all started when, on Wednesday, after his general audience, he felt a strong discomfort that forced him to go quickly to the Gemelli Polyclinic. But his recovery has been quick, and he even had time to share some pizzas with the health personnel and their assistants, and on Friday afternoon he visited some children admitted to the neurosurgery and oncology unit, to whom he also brought Easter eggs and other gifts. He came to baptize one of them, little Miguel Ãngel, the most “beautiful” moment of his stay in the hospital, according to what he recognized…
Yesterday, when he left the hospital, Francisco showed that he had not lost his sense of humor. He wanted to get out of the car especially to greet the journalists and, asked how he was, he declared: “I’m still alive”, in a clear message given the rumors generated by some prelates. The feeling is that he wanted to make an effort to quickly return to the Holy See and not miss the important Holy Week, aware that, at 86, this could unleash a scenario of pressure for an eventual resignation from the pontificate, as It happened with the last Easter of John Paul II.
In fact, the Argentine Pope wanted to especially thank the reporters for their work reporting on the evolution of his state of health. “Beautiful articles, precise things to avoid fantasies. You are brave, brave, â€he assured them, before the noise of a conclave that broke out after he entered the Gemelli.