VATICAN CITY
Boston Globe
By John L. Allen Jr. | GLOBE STAFF JUNE 21, 2014
ROME — An old saying about the Vatican holds that the pope is never sick until he’s dead. It is a subject — pontiff’s health — on which Vatican officials come by their reputation for denial the old-fashioned way, because over the years they’ve certainly earned it.
On Aug. 19, 1914, for instance, the semiofficial Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano published a stinging editorial denouncing unnamed commentators who had suggested the day before that the reigning pope at the time, Pius X, was suffering from a cold.
Less than 24 hours later, Pius X was dead.
More recently, despite the fact that speculation began to surface in the mid-1990s that Pope John Paul II might be suffering from the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, the Vatican never officially confirmed the ailment until shortly before the pontiff’s death.
Even in John Paul’s twilight, the effort to make the pope seem stronger than he actually was continued.
After he underwent a tracheotomy in late February 2005, a Vatican spokesman claimed the next day that the pope had eaten a light breakfast including 10 cookies, leaving embarrassed physicians to correct the record; a patient with a tracheal tube, they said, would not be in a position to swallow cookies.
Needless to say, the media didn’t swallow the story either.
All this brings us to this week’s alleged “health scare” regarding Pope Francis, after news broke that the pontiff has canceled his general audiences and morning Masses for the month of July.
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