VATICAN CITY, Rome — Now back home, Pope Francis is seeking to impose a kind of normality on the papacy with his informal style and disdain for pomp while ensuring that he still wields the awesome power held by Christ's vicar on Earth and Europe's last absolute monarch.

The pope's management of his five-week hospitalization for pneumonia follows the same perseverance he has always zhown, thus on March 22, it allowed his doctors to announce the very normal news that the pontiff would be released the following day.

At a news conference, doctors said Francis would need two months of rest and convalescence at the Vatican, and he eventually could resume all his normal activity running the 1.3-billion strong Catholic Church.
While hospitalized at the Fondazione Policlinico Universitario Agostino Gemelli (Gemelli University Hospital) in Rome's Lazio district, Francis had stayed in control, remotely, and he had never stopped performing his duties. Between respiratory crises, prayer and physiotherapy, Francis appointed over a dozen bishops, approved a handful of new saints, authorized a three-year extension of his signature reform process and sent off messages public and private. Vatican cardinals stood in for him at events requiring his presence.

For most who witnessed the 88-year-old pontiff's resilience, it was not as easy a balancing act as it sounds, since there are few positions of power that are both as absolute as the papacy and, during times of illness, as seemingly fragile. According to the Church's canon law, the pope possesses "supreme, full, immediate, and universal ordinary power in the church." He answers to no one but God, and there is no appeal of his decisions.

And while popes aren't subject to re-election campaigns or no-confidence votes, they essentially owe their jobs to the 120 men who elected them. Although those same cardinals swear obedience to the pope, they will also eventually choose his successor from within their own ranks. It's no surprise then that talk of conclaves, papal contenders and challenges facing a future pope has been a constant buzz in Rome ever since Francis was admitted to Gemelli hospital on Valentine's Day, February 14.

Francis is well aware that anytime he gets sick, plotting intensifies for the election of the next pope, contributing to a certain lame duck status as he ages.

"Some wanted me dead," he said after his 2021 hospitalization, when he learned that secret meetings had already been held to plan the conclave. He knows as well that even before his current hospitalization, an anonymous cardinal had circulated a seven-point memo listing priorities for the next pope to correct the "confusion, division and conflict" sowed by Francis.

But the Argentine pontiff is not shy about showing weakness, his age or infirmities in ways that seem unthinkable for public figures for whom any sign of fragility can threaten their authority and undermine their agenda.
Additionally, within months of being elected, Francis reached out to an Argentine doctor and journalist, Dr. Nelson Castro, and suggested he write a book about the health of popes, himself included.

"My hypothesis is that he wanted first of all to show himself as a human being," Castro said in an interview. "We tend to see popes like saints, but the way he talked about his diseases showed me, 'I'm like you and me, being exposed to diseases.'"

"Pope Francis is a man of power," Castro added. "Only a man of power, feeling quite sure of himself, would dare to talk about his diseases so openly."

For Jesuit Fr. John Cecero, provincial for the northeast United States 2014-2020, Francis' willingness to show his weaknesses while exercising supreme authority is consistent with his Jesuit training and the biblical teaching of St. Paul that "when I am weak, then I am strong."

"I know it's something that drives Francis: that you have that same humility," cecero cited.
And yet Francis' critics often complain that he's authoritarian, that he makes decisions in a vacuum and without regard to the law, and wields power like a Dictator Pope, the title of a book written by a traditionalist critic early in Francis' papacy.

Those same conservative critics, of course, have been keenly watching Francis' hospitalization and wondering if the end of his papacy is near.

But even if he is absent, and even if he has to cut back his public activities going forward, Francis is very much still in power and leading the church, said Kurt Martens, a canon lawyer at Catholic University of America.

"We're used to seeing a pope who is everywhere all the time," he said. "But don't forget that in the past, not that long ago, popes would show up only rarely."