When Pope Francis was asked last month how he was doing after surgery on his colon in July, he replied: ‘Still alive, even though some people wanted me to die. I know there were even meetings between prelates who thought the Pope’s condition was more serious than the official version. They were preparing for the conclave. Patience!’
It was such a ferocious outburst that few people realised that Francis was talking about two separate things. He’s 84, which is old even for a pope. The medical reports said that he didn’t have cancer, but he did stay in hospital longer than expected and Italian doctors don’t have a great track record of telling the truth about an elderly pontiff’s state of health.
There’s no obvious front-runner to succeed Francis, and his policy of creating cardinals from ‘the peripheries’ (e.g. Tonga, with just 16,000 Catholics) means that many of them are complete outsiders in Rome.
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