by Tablet Staff
ROME (Crux) — As Pope Francis enters his 14th day at the Gemelli Hospital, now the longest of his four stays at the Roman polyclinic, some observers may be tempted to regard the long papal hospitalization as exceptional.
In fact, however, by the standards of Pope Francis’ predecessor, St. John Paul II, the current pontiff has a long way to go before he’ll get close to setting any records.
Indeed, as of Feb. 27, Pope Francis’ stay at Gemelli is merely tied for fifth place on the all-time list, with the same number of days that St. John Paul was hospitalized in 1992 for the removal of a benign intestinal tumor in July.
The Polish pope’s most famous spell at the sprawling Roman clinic, named for the early 20th-century Franciscan priest and physician Father Agostino Gemelli, came in May 1981, when he was rushed to the hospital following an assassination attempt in St. Peter’s Square. He underwent a delicate six-hour surgery to remove the bullets that had lodged in his body and to repair the damage they had caused.
He was released from the hospital and returned to the Vatican on June 3, 1981, after a 22-day stay.
A couple weeks later, however, it was discovered that St. John Paul was running a severe fever, and he was returned to Gemelli for treatment. There, he was diagnosed with cytomegalovirus, a common infection often compared to mononucleosis. It was decided at the same time to perform a follow-up operation from the earlier surgery to close a temporary colostomy, or artificial outlet, created after an assassin’s bullet injured the lower intestines. Yet that operation couldn’t be performed until the fever from the infection was under control, which took weeks to accomplish.
In all, St. John Paul was in Gemelli on that second occasion in 1981 from June 20 to August 14, a robust total of 55 days in the hospital.
Other stays by St. John Paul longer than Pope Francis’s current hospitalization (as of Feb. 27) include a 28-day stay in 1994 for an operation to repair a fracture to the right femur and his final 18-day recovery in Gemelli from a respiratory crisis from Feb. 24, 2005, until his return to the Vatican on March 13.
St. John Paul would die just a few days later, on April 2, in the papal apartments of the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace.
In all, St. John Paul made seven stays at Gemelli over the course of his almost 27-year papacy, and that’s not counting an outpatient procedure in November 1993 to repair a dislocated shoulder.
All in, St. John Paul spent a grand total of 155 days at Gemelli over his term in office, representing more than five months of his papacy. The lengthy character of so many of his hospitalizations explains why Pope St. John Paul dubbed Gemelli the “Vatican III,” after the actual Vatican centered on St. Peter’s Square and the traditional papal summer residence in Castel Gandolfo.
Pope Benedict XVI was never hospitalized himself at Gemelli, though he once traveled crosstown to the facility to visit his ailing brother, Georg.
By way of comparison to Pope St. John Paul II, Pope Francis has spent just 36 days at Gemelli so far, and counting — not, of course, that Pope St. John Paul’s is a record anyone is trying to break.
Still, the disparity in papal hospitalizations is another reminder that, over such a long pontificate, St. John Paul set countless records that will be difficult for anyone else to break. In the present case, Pope Francis would no doubt be entirely satisfied to finish a distant second.