In front of the popes you are always with your nose up. From the announcement of the “Habemus Papam” onwards it is a continuous look to a balcony or a window. To receive a blessing Urbi et orbi or to listen to Angelus or Queen Coeli on Sunday at noon, when the Pope overlooks the window of his private apartment.
Then it happens that the popes get sick and go to the hospital. And then the gaze extends to the tenth floor of the Gemelli Polyclinic, where the room for the hospitalizations of the popes has been equipped.
But it is only since 13 May 1981 that the large hospital structure built in the northwest area of Rome, more than 5 kilometers from the Vatican, has become “the Pope’s hospital”. And it became it in a dramatic circumstance, of total urgency, to save the life of John Paul II, wounded by the bullets shot by AGCA wings in St. Peter’s Square, during a general hearing, while the car discovered of the Pope moved to interior of the piazza wondered of faithful. Pope Wojtyla arrived in ambulance and was immediately brought to the operating room, where the Calabrian surgeon Francesco Crucitti saved his life at the end of a complex surgical operation.
An attack on the pope’s life and a pope who urgently brought to the hospital were two unheard of events. Without going back over the centuries, in the twentieth century the popes, in case of illness, had always been treated inside the Vatican. Pius XII died in Castel Gandolfo. His successor, John XXIII, fell ill with a stomach tumor and, as the Vaticanist Benny Lai said in his book “The secrets of the Vatican. From Pius XII to Pope Wojtyla “, there was a highly reserved consultation of the most authoritative Italian surgeons of the time. Pope Roncalli was visited in the Vatican by four luminaries, who also took into consideration the hypothesis of surgery. But the tumor was in an advanced phase, now palpable to the abdomen, and John XXIII died in his apartment in the Vatican, after a painful agony, on June 3, 1963.
Paul VI also had health problems, but they are not his hospitalizations. However, it seems that in 1967, at the age of 70, Montini underwent prostate intervention in a surgical room equipped for the occasion inside the Vatican. Paolo VI then died on August 6, 1978 in Castel Gandolfo, weakened by various ailments and with the heart broken by the pain for the killing of Aldo Moro (“You did not fulfill our plea for the safety of Aldo Moro, of this good man , mild, wise, innocent and friend, “he said in the unforgettable funeral ceremony without coffin in Lateran).
Albino Luciani’s pontificate was so short (33 days, “The space of a smile”, he titled Mondi) that there was no time for any hospitalizations, even if John Paul I suffered from circulatory problems. His death came suddenly, late in the evening, while he was in his bed in the Vatican. A “normal” death which, however, raised long imaginative reconstructions (including the hypothesis of the poisoning), also favored by a not always transparent communication by the Holy See.
After the emergency hospitalization in May 1981, John Paul II was hospitalized six times at the Gemelli Polyclinic. Once, it was 1996, he joked also saying: “The Vatican one is in St. Peter’s Square, the Vatican two is in Castel Gandolfo, the Vatican Tre has become the Gemelli Polyclinic. Years later, in the square in front of the entrance of the Polyclinic, a large statue of the Carrara marble Pope was placed, made by the artist Stefano Pierotti. Wojtyla’s last hospitalization at the Vatican Tre, which lasted 18 days, was in March 2005, when it was now inexorably weakened by Parkinson’s. John Paul II returned to the Vatican to die in his apartment, edited by the doctors of Gemelli, on the evening of April 2.
Benedict XVI was never hospitalized at Gemelli, but he went there to find his brother Georg. Instead also Pope Francis, with the inevitable ailments of age (with his 88 years he is among the longest -lived popes in history), he had to become familiar with the “third Vatican”, as we see in these days. But in the meantime there is also a “fourth Vatican”, that is, the former Fatebenefratelli of the Tiber Island, from 2022 Tiberian Island Hospital – Isola Gemini. Here Francesco has never been hospitalized, but given the proximity to the Vatican it has gone several times for fast medical checks, always carried out with the utmost confidentiality.
