Pope, slowed by aging, finds lessons in frailty
Vatican official: ‘Aging is one of the great challenges of the 21st century’
WLAC STE. ANNE, Alberta hen Pope Francis landed in Canada this week, he lumbered out of a car on the tarmac, hobbled with difficulty to an awaiting wheelchair and froze in place as cameras shot at close range the spectacle of an aide adjusting the pontiff’s footrests.
On a makeshift stage outside an Indigenous cemetery in Alberta, the world watched as he gathered his strength and grasped the arms of the aide, who lifted him out of his wheelchair.
In Lac Ste. Anne, a remote lake renowned for its miraculous healing powers, hundreds of worshippers waiting for Francis in a shrine adorned with the crutches and canes of the cured, gasped in unison as the pope’s wheelchair hit a snag and he lurched dangerously forward.
A Vatican video feed quickly cut away. But seeing Francis in his increasing frailty and advancing old age was very much a point of his visit.
While the pontiff’s main mission in Canada was what he called a “pilgrimage of penance” to apologize to Indigenous people for the horrific abuses they endured in church-run residential schools, it was also a pilgrimage of senescence in which the pontiff, 85, used his own vulnerability to demand dignity for the aged in a world increasingly populated by them.
There needed to be built “a future in which the elderly are not cast aside because, from a ‘practical’ standpoint, they are no longer useful,” Francis said at a Mass at Commonwealth Stadium in Edmonton, Alberta, one of the few events in a papal travel schedule that was much lighter than usual. “A future that is not indifferent to the need of the aged to be cared for and listened to,” he added.
Francis, heavier, slowed by major intestinal surgery last year and suffering from torn knee ligaments and sciatica, is not the first pope to make the dignity of the aged a central concern of his later papacy.
The once vigorous John Paul II spent his last years folded over, ravaged by Parkinson’s. For some, his ailing magnified his spirituality and echoed the suffering of Christ on the cross.
For others, it was a disconcerting decline and raised questions about the governance of the Roman Catholic Church. His successor,
Pope Benedict XVI, cited his flagging energy as the reason for his resignation, a historic break with papal practice that has cast a shadow over Francis and his physical decline. Resigning has “never entered my mind,” Francis said in a recent interview with Reuters, before inserting his usual qualification, that his calculation could change if failing health made it impossible for him to run the church.
But if Benedict opted out, and severe disease left John Paul II with no choice but to put his ailing front and center, Francis is purposefully, and incessantly, trying to reshape modern society to be more hospitable to the old.
A top Vatican official, Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, said in a recent interview he had persuaded Francis to articulate a new church teaching on aging that was also “proposed not with words but with the body” because, he said, “the old can teach us that we all are, in reality, fragile.”
“Aging is one of the great challenges of the 21st century,” added Paglia, who also presides over an Italian Health Ministry commission for the reform of the health and social care of older people in Italy, which has one of the oldest populations in the world.
A United Nations report has predicted \ people age 60 and over will exceed people under 15 by 2050.
Paglia said that advancements in longevity science and medicine extended life spans by decades and created “a new population of old people.” But that also created a contradiction, he added, because a society obsessed with living longer had not changed to accommodate those of advanced age, either economically, politically or even spiritually.
Starting even before he became pope at age 76, Francis has paid special attention to older people. In the book On Heaven and Earth, he said ignoring the health needs of older people constituted “covert euthanasia” and that the aged often “end up being stored away in a nursing home like an overcoat that is hung up in the closet during the summer.”
In 2013, the year of his election, he used World Youth Day celebrations to honor older people. In a 2014 pre-Easter ritual meant to underline his service to humanity, he washed and kissed the feet of older and disabled people in wheelchairs. In 2021, he established an annual World Day for Grandparents and the Elderly to honor the “forgotten.”