Pope Francis “had a restful night,” and Thursday morning “got out of bed and had breakfast in an armchair,” the Vatican said in a statement.
Francis was admitted to Rome’s Gemelli Hospital last week with bronchitis, which then developed into double pneumonia.
Vatican spokesperson Matteo Bruni said Thursday that the pope now has focal pneumonia with limited areas of infection in the lungs. Bruni said Francis is breathing on his own, and his heart is stable.
An earlier statement Thursday reported the pope’s clinical condition as “stable,” and his blood tests had shown “a slight improvement, particularly in the inflammatory indices.”
Wednesday evening, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni visited the pope for 20 minutes in the hospital’s special papal suite.
“We joked as always,” the prime minister said in a statement afterward. “He hasn’t lost his proverbial sense of humor.”
Francis, whose birth name is Jorge Mario Bergoglio, has been the head of the Roman Catholic Church since 2013, when his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, resigned from the papacy.
In a recent memoir, Francis addressed the possibility of his own resignation if he became incapacitated. He said such a move would be a “distant possibility,” justified only if facing “a serious physical impediment.”
“We are all worried about the pope,” Cardinal Matteo Maria Zuppi, head of the Italian Bishops’ Conference, told Agence France-Presse. Zuppi said, however, that the reports about Francis eating and greeting people are good indications that “we are on the right path to a full recovery, which we hope will happen soon.”
Speaking at a Vatican news conference about a Mediterranean youth peace initiative, Cardinal Juan Jose Omella Omella of Barcelona compared the papacy to a train to give reassurances that the work of the papacy will continue, even with Francis’ hospitalization.
“Popes change, we bishops change, priests in parishes change, communities change, but the train continues being on the move,” the cardinal said.
Some information in this report came from Reuters and Agence France-Presse.
