While Pope Francis is lying in a hospital bed in critical condition, Cardinal Pietro Parolin led prayers for 45 minutes on Monday night as approximately 4,000 Catholics gathered in St. Peter’s Square, praying for the pope’s recovery.
The Vatican announced on Monday night that the 88-year-old pope was still in critical condition after a “prolonged respiratory crisis” that required a high flow of oxygen. He has also been given blood transfusions after tests revealed thrombocytopenia, which is associated with anemia.
Pope Francis was admitted to the hospital on Feb. 14 after being diagnosed with double pneumonia and chronic bronchitis that had left him breathless and unable to read prepared speeches.
Pope Francis has a history of respiratory illness, having lost part of one of his lungs to pleurisy as a young man. He had an acute case of pneumonia in 2023.
Despite his health crisis, the Vatican reported that Pope Francis has made daily calls to the pastor of the Holy Family parish in Gaza “to express his paternal closeness to the people there.”
Rabbi Yosef Dayan, a member of the nascent Sanhedrin who can trace his lineage back to King David, is unafraid of expressing candid and sometimes harsh criticisms of leaders. In July 2005, one month before the IDF dismantled Gush Katif and evicted almost 9,000 Jews from their homes, Rabbi Dayan led a group of ten rabbis in performing the Pulsa diNura on Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Sharon’s health deteriorated, and by January, he suffered a hemorrhagic stroke, entering a vegetative state from which he never recovered. Rabbi Dayan also led rabbis in the Pulsa diNura against Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin a few months before he was assassinated. Rabin was shot and killed in 1995 by Yigal Amir, an extremist who opposed Rabin’s peace initiative, and particularly the signing of the Oslo Accords.
But Rabbi Dayan was somewhat measured in his criticism of the ailing Pope.
“From the Bible, we learn that even the most righteous are taken from this world, and certainly the evil people are removed as a mercy to stop them from doing more sins and damaging Creation,” Rabbi Dayan said. “But this pope has failed in his most basic duty. As the spiritual leader of Catholics, it was his duty to show them that God had kept His promise and returned the Jews to the land He promised them. His job as a shepherd of the Catholics was to proclaim that prophecy had been fulfilled. He didn’t.”
“In the wake of the October 7th attack, when Gazan civilians joined Hamas in murdering and raping, just a few days after Hamas returned the bodies of the Bibas children who Gazan civilians took hostage, Pope Francis is siding with the murderers in an act that he believes is mercy but is really a lie.”
“This is a message to all the leaders of nations in the world. When Solomon built the Temple in Jerusalem, the kings came from around the world to acknowledge the House of Prayer for all Nations. Now that we are about to see the Third Temple, we see rulers talking about a nation that doesn’t exist and never existed. They are trying to prevent the Jews from doing what God commanded us to do: take possession of the land.”
“If we can’t do that, then there will be no house of prayer for all nations and no reason for the nations to exist,” Rabbi Dayan said.
Pope Francis’ anti-Israel/pro-Palestinian agenda has led him into bizarre theological territory that diverges from traditional Catholicism. In December, he attended a nativity scene crafted in Bethlehem depicting the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem featured Baby Jesus lying on a Keffiyeh, a traditional Arab head covering for men that PLO leader Yasser Arafat appropriated as a symbol of Palestinian terrorism.
The scene was a product of Liberation Theology, which depicts Jesus as a “Palestinian” born in “Bethlehem, Palestine who is a secular Social Justice Warrior fighting the “Occupation” (i.e. Israel). This is a twist on classical Christian belief, attempting to base Palestinian resistance to Israel as well as Palestinian national aspirations in the Christian Gospel. It includes an intense valorization of Palestinian ethnic and cultural identity as guarantors of a more accurate grasp of the gospel because they are the true inhabitants of the land of Jesus and the Bible. Liberation Theology defines Jesus as a Palestinian living under Israeli occupation. It represents Christianity as a human rights movement.
Pope Francis has been increasingly anti-Israel as the IDF fights existential threats on seven fronts. Last month, the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) reported that on Jan. 3, Pope Francis met with Abolhassan Navab, an Iranian cleric who heads the regime’s University of Religions and Confessions (URC), an entity responsible for overseeing the persecution of Christian converts in Iran.
The IRNA reported that during the meeting, Pope Francis slammed Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, saying, “God created humans free, but today there are those who want to enslave people and humanity to achieve their goals…We also have no problem with the Jews, and our only problem is with Benjamin Netanyahu, who, regardless of International laws and human rights, has created crises in the region and the world.”
In an interview in October about a soon-to-be-published book, Pope Francis called for an investigation into claims that Israel is carrying out a “genocide” in Gaza.
Last year, Pope Francis met with Palestinians whose relatives were security prisoners in Israeli jails or were in Gaza. Members of the Palestinian delegation told the media that the pope had described Israel’s actions as “genocide.”
In September, Pope Francis responded to a question about IDF airstrikes in Lebanon that killed Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah; he replied that Israel’s airstrikes in Lebanon were going “beyond morality.”
In December, Pope Francis labeled children dying in wars, including in the Gaza Strip, as the “little Jesuses of today,” and said that IDF actions were reaping an “appalling harvest.”
The Vatican supports a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians that would establish an unprecedented militarized Palestinian state inside Israel’s borders that has been ethnically cleansed of Jews, with its capital in an exclusively Muslim Jerusalem.
Pope Francis has a history of being myopic regarding Palestinians and Arabs bent on destroying the Jewish state. In 2015, just a few days after the Vatican officially recognized the Palestinian state, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was granted an audience in the Apostolic Palace. After the meeting, Francis gave Abbas a special medallion, representing the angel of peace “destroying the bad spirit of war.” The Pope explained to Abbas that the gift was appropriate since “you are an angel of peace.”
Pope Francis, born Jorge Mario Bergoglio, is 88 years old. He was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and is the first pope from the Society of Jesus (the Jesuit Order), the first from the Americas and the Southern Hemisphere, and the first pope born or raised outside Europe since the 8th-century Syrian pope Gregory III.
Following Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation on 28 February 2013, a papal conclave elected Bergoglio as his successor on 13 March 2013.
