Pope Francis meets Vatican No. 2 at hospital, takes major governing decisions

Pope Francis was well enough to meet with the Vatican secretary of state to approve new decrees for possible saints and make some major governing decisions that suggest he is getting essential work done and looking ahead despite being hospitalized in critical condition with double pneumonia. The audience, which occurred Monday, signalled that the machinery of the Vatican is still grinding on even though doctors have warned the prognosis for the 88-year-old Francis is guarded.

The Vatican’s Tuesday noon bulletin contained a series of significant decisions, most importantly that Francis had met with Cardinal Pietro Parolin and Archbishop Edgar Pena Parra, the so-called Vatican “substitute” or chief of staff. It was the first known time the pope had met with Parolin, who is essentially the Vatican prime minister, since his Feb. 14 hospitalisation.

During the audience, Francis approved decrees for two new saints and five people for beatification — the first step toward sainthood. Francis also decided to “convene a consistory about the future canonizations.” Francis regularly approves decrees from the Vatican’s saint-making office when he is at the Vatican, albeit during audiences with the head of the office, not Parolin. But the calling of a consistory, which is a formal meeting of cardinals, was also significant and forward-looking, given his illness.

No date was set for the meeting. But it was at a banal consistory to set dates for canonisations on Feb. 11, 2013, that Pope Benedict XVI announced, in Latin, that he would resign because he couldn’t keep up with the rigors of the papacy. Francis has said he, too, would consider resigning if he found himself in that situation, after Benedict “opened the door” to it and became the first pope in 600 years to retire.

Francis has said that if he were to resign, he would live in Rome, outside the Vatican, and be called ’emeritus bishop of Rome” rather than emeritus pope given the problems that occurred with Benedict’s experiment as a retired pope. Francis has also written a letter of resignation, to be invoked if he became medically incapacitated.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by DNA staff and is published from AP/PTI)