Pope Francis has suspended his schedule for Monday due to “a mild flu,” the Vatican press office announced early this morning. The statement tried to play down the nature of the decision, explaining that it is “a precautionary measure considering the trips in the coming days,” referring to the visit he plans to make from Thursday to Sunday to Luxembourg and Belgium.
The 87-year-old pontiff, who has various health problems, is once again suffering from ailments after the respiratory illness he suffered in March which prevented him from giving long speeches for several weeks, and also, for the first time, the homily on Palm Sunday. However, he later recovered and at the beginning of this month he undertook the longest trip of his pontificate, a tiring 12-day journey through Asia and Oceania, during which he visited Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor and Singapore in high temperatures and tropical humidity. He returned on September 13.
It was precisely on the return flight, during which he usually answers questions from journalists, that he announced that he wanted to go to the Canary Islands at some point, due to the humanitarian crisis with immigration, although there is still no date and the Vatican has no information on the matter. “I am thinking a little about this, about going to the Canary Islands because there is the situation there with migrants arriving from the sea and I would like to be close to the rulers and the people of the Canary Islands,” were his words.
Last Thursday, Francis received in a private audience the director of the Cervantes Institute, Luis García Montero, who told reporters on leaving that he had not spoken to him about this issue. If he does make this trip, Francis would become the first pontiff to visit the islands, and it would also be the first time he has gone to Spain.
The possibility of this trip to the Canary Islands has been on the table since January 22, when the Canarian president, Fernando Clavijo, confirmed after meeting with the Pope in the Vatican that he had told him that he was “going to think about it.” Francis has shown from the first day of his mandate a special sensitivity towards the drama of immigration, since his first trip was to the Italian island of Lampedusa, the centre of the migratory crises on the Mediterranean routes to Italy, and he has also been twice to the Greek island of Lesbos.
Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who will turn 88 in December, is in a wheelchair and has undergone surgery three times in three years – part of his colon was removed in 2021, his right knee in 2022 and an intestinal obstruction in 2023. His situation is being watched with particular interest following the resignation in 2013 of Benedict XVI, his predecessor, something that had not happened since the 13th century. His resignation is therefore no longer an impossibility.
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He himself has said bluntly that the day he no longer feels strong enough he will follow the example of Joseph Ratzinger, but he has always added that for the moment he sees it far away. The last time was in March, in his autobiography: “I believe that the Petrine ministry is ad vitam “and therefore I do not see any conditions for a resignation. Things would change if a serious physical impediment were to occur, and in that case I already signed, at the beginning of the pontificate, the letter of resignation that is deposited in the Secretariat of State. (…) But this is a distant hypothesis, because I really do not have such serious reasons to think of a resignation.”
It is not known whether the Pope will also cancel his engagements and audiences for the rest of the week. He has preferred to rest in order to be in good condition for the trip that begins on Thursday. First, he will visit Luxembourg, a stopover of a few hours during which he will meet the head of state, the prime minister and other authorities. In the afternoon he will fly to Brussels (Belgium), where in the following days he will be received by the king and queen and the authorities, he will meet with students from the University of Louvain and he will celebrate a mass on Sunday, before returning to Rome in the afternoon.
