Pope Francis’ intimate experience of sickness and suffering

The Pope's lung weakness has been public since the beginning of his pontificate and even since the conclave of 2005. It has caused repeated bouts of illness since then. However, the information that the Argentine Pontiff has “only one lung” is inaccurate: He actually has two lungs, but underwent a major operation at the age of 20 to have cysts removed from the lobe of his right lung.

In his recent autobiography Hope, the Pope evokes this painful memory of August 1957, in the now almost forgotten context of the Asian flu epidemic “which would cause millions of deaths that year throughout the world,” he recalls. Sick like all his fellow seminarians, Jorge Mario Bergoglio saw his condition deteriorate more than the others. The institute’s doctor, whom the seminarians viciously nicknamed “the Animal,” didn’t take his situation seriously.

Thanks to a late decision of the prefect of studies of the seminary, the future pope was finally transferred to the Syrian Lebanese Hospital in Buenos Aires.

“But my survival was mainly thanks to a nun,“ Pope Francis says in this account, paying a vibrant tribute to the Dominican nun Cornelia Caraglio. It was she who ordered his dose of antibiotics to be doubled.

The specialist, summoned by the nun, “drained one and a half liters of fluid from my lungs,” the Pope says in his autobiography. This procedure “began a slow and unsteady climb back from the brink between life and death. To perform the endoscopy to my lungs without affecting my heart, they filled me with morphine: The world seemed distorted, people became miniature; that too was a terrible experience, one aspect of the nightmare into which I had fallen,” says Francis.

“My companions came from the seminary to visit me; some also gave me their blood for transfusions,” the Pope continues, grateful for this community solidarity. “Gradually the fevers decided to leave me, and the light began to return.”

This health incident was a major turning point in the life of the future pope. “I enjoyed the seminary, even though I left it. Or rather, they carried me out of the seminary: on a stretcher, on the point of death,” he recalls.

It was after his recovery that Jorge Mario Bergoglio joined the Society of Jesus the following year, for a very long period of training that would lead to his ordination as a priest in 1969 and his final vows in 1973.

This youthful experience shaped Pope Francis' reflection on suffering. In his recent message for the World Day of the Sick on February 11, 2025, Pope Francis emphasized how we “experience the closeness and compassion of God, who, in Jesus, shared in our human suffering. God does not abandon us and often amazes us by granting us a strength that we never have expected, and would never have found on our own.”

“Sickness, then, becomes an occasion for a transformative encounter, the discovery of a solid rock to which we can hold fast amid the tempests of life,” says the Pope. His whole message is full of a positive vision of hospitalization as a place of solidarity and fraternity.

“Places of suffering are frequently also places of sharing and mutual enrichment,” he goes on to say. Through all those involved in care, “we discover love,” he explains.

Now some years ago, Pope Francis delivered the Angelus of July 11, 2021, from the Gemelli hospital, where he had just undergone major colon and intestinal surgery. The Pope urged his listeners to “pray for all those who are sick, especially for those in the most difficult conditions: may no one be left alone, may everyone receive the anointing of listening, closeness, tenderness and care.”

He expressed his thanks to the doctors, but also his compassion for the sick children he had met during his hospitalization.

This experience of the hospital as a community of life was also reflected, to some extent, in Sunday's communiqué on his state of health. It was stated that, during that Sunday morning, in the apartment on the 10th floor of the Gemelli, Pope Francis had “participated in Holy Mass, with those who are taking care of him during these days of hospitalization.” It was a way, even in his suffering and vulnerability, of assuming his pontifical function in a dynamic of faith and gratitude for the medical profession.