March 25, 2025 // Vatican

After 5 Weeks in the Hospital, Pope Returns to the Vatican

Cindy Wooden

Catholic News Service

ROME (CNS) – Immediately before leaving Rome’s Gemelli Hospital after more than five weeks of treatment for breathing difficulties, double pneumonia, and infections, Pope Francis greeted hundreds of people who gathered outside the hospital on Sunday, March 23.

With a very weak voice, Pope Francis thanked the crowd, waving his hands and giving a thumbs up.

He also pointed to a woman carrying a yellow-wrapped bouquet of flowers and told the crowd, “She’s good.”

An aide had pushed Pope Francis in his wheelchair onto the balcony overlooking the square outside the hospital, where some 600 people had gathered, including Rome’s Mayor Roberto Gualtieri. Hundreds of people also gathered in front of video screens in St. Peter’s Square to see the pope for the first time since he was hospitalized on February 14.

The pope left the hospital almost immediately after his appearance on the balcony.

Rather than go directly home, Pope Francis was driven through the center of Rome to the Basilica of St. Mary Major, where he has prayed before and after every foreign trip and after his two previous hospitalizations for abdominal surgery.

Pope Francis did not go into the church but left a bouquet of flowers to be placed on the altar under the Marian icon Salus Populi Romani or “Health of the Roman People.”

Just before the 88-year-old pope had come out on the hospital balcony, the Vatican released a text he had prepared for the midday Angelus prayer.

The pope’s message focused on the day’s Gospel reading of the parable of the fig tree from Luke 13:1-9, in which a gardener asks a landowner to allow him to spare a fig tree that had not borne fruit for three years; the gardener asks to be given a year to fertilize and care for the tree in the hope that it would bear fruit in the future.

“The patient gardener is the Lord, who thoughtfully works the soil of our lives and waits confidently for our return to Him,” the pope wrote.

“In this long period of hospitalization, I have experienced the Lord’s patience, which I also see reflected in the tireless solicitude of the doctors and health care workers, as well as in the attention and hopes of the family members of the sick,” who also are in Gemelli, he wrote.

“This trusting patience, anchored in God’s love that does not fail, is indeed necessary in our lives, especially in facing the most difficult and painful situations,” Pope Francis wrote.

In an interview published on Tuesday, March 25, in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, Dr. Sergio Alfieri, the coordinator of Pope Francis’ medial team, said that Friday, February 28, was the worst day for the pope and those entrusted with his care.

“For the first time I saw tears in the eyes of some of the people around him,” Alfieri said two days after the pope had returned to the Vatican. “We were all aware that the situation had deteriorated further and there was a risk that he might not make it.”

The Vatican medical bulletin from February 28 said: “The Holy Father, this afternoon, after a morning spent alternating between respiratory physiotherapy and prayer in the chapel, experienced an isolated episode of bronchospasm. This caused an episode of vomiting, which led to him inhaling some and a sudden worsening of his respiratory condition.”

The doctors aspirated his airways and put him on noninvasive mechanical ventilation, a machine that delivers air with added oxygen through a tightly fitted face mask and using positive pressure to assist breathing.

Alfieri and Vatican officials have said several times that Pope Francis was never intubated and that he always remained “alert and aware.”

The doctor told Corriere, “We had to make a choice between stopping and letting him go or pressing on and trying all the drugs and therapies we could, running the very high risk of damaging other organs. And in the end, we took that path.”

Asked who made the final decision, Alfieri said, “The Holy Father always decides.”

But he added that Pope Francis had “delegated all kinds of health care decisions to Massimiliano Strappetti, his personal health care assistant, who knows perfectly well the pontiff’s wishes.”

Strappetti advised, “Try everything, don’t give up,” Alfieri said. “That’s what we all thought, too. And nobody gave up.”

Corriere also asked Alfieri if Pope Francis was aware of the danger he was in.

“Yes,” he responded, “because he was always alert. Even when his condition worsened, he was fully conscious. That night was terrible; he knew, as we did, that he might not make it through the night. We saw the man in pain. However, from the first day, he asked us to tell him the truth and wanted us to be honest about his condition.”