Pope Francis, slowed aging, finds lessons in frailty

When Pope Francis landed in Canada this week, he lumbered out of a car on the tarmac, hobbled with difficulty to an awaiting wheelchair and froze in place as cameras shot at close range the spectacle of an aide adjusting the pontiff’s footrests.
On a makeshift stage outside an Indigenous cemetery in Alberta, the world watched as he gathered his strength and grasped the arms of the aide, who lifted him out of his wheelchair.
In Lac Ste. Anne, a remote lake renowned for its miraculous healing powers, hundreds of worshippers waiting for Francis in a shrine adorned with the crutches and canes of the cured, gasped in unison as the pope’s wheelchair hit a snag and he lurched dangerously forward.
A Vatican video feed quickly cut away. But seeing Francis in his increasing frailty and advancing old age was very much a point of his visit.
Crowds gather for Pope Francis’ arrival in Lac Ste. Anne, Alberta, Canada, July 26, 2022. On a visit to Canada, the pontiff, 85, used his own vulnerability to demand dignity and respect for older people in a world increasingly populated them. (Ian Willms/The New York Times)
While the pontiff’s main mission in Canada was what he called a “pilgrimage of penance” to apologize to Indigenous people for the horrific abuses they endured in church-run residential schools, it was also a pilgrimage of senescence in which the pontiff, 85, used his own vulnerability to demand dignity for the aged in a world increasingly populated them.
There needed to be built “a future in which the elderly are not cast aside because, from a ‘practical’ standpoint, they are no longer useful,” Francis said at a Mass at Commonwealth Stadium in Edmonton, Alberta, one of the few events in a papal travel schedule that was much lighter than usual. “A future that is not indifferent to the need of the aged to be cared for and lened to,” he added.
Francis, heavier, slowed major intestinal surgery last year and suffering from torn knee ligaments and sciatica, is not the first pope to make the dignity of the aged a central concern of his later papacy.
The once vigorous John Paul II spent his last years folded over, ravaged Parkinson’s. For some, his ailing magnified his spirituality and echoed the suffering of Chr on the cross.
For others, it was a disconcerting decline and raised questions about the governance of the Roman Catholic Church. His successor, Pope Benedict XVI, cited his flagging energy as the reason for his resignation, a horic break with papal practice that has cast a shadow over Francis and his physical decline.
Resigning has “never entered my mind,” Francis said in a recent interview with Reuters, before inserting his usual qualification, that his calculation could change if failing health made it impossible for him to run the church.
But if Benedict opted out, and severe disease left John Paul II with no choice but to put his ailing front and center, Francis is purposefully, and incessantly, trying to reshape modern society to be more hospitable to the old.
A top Vatican official, Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, said in a recent interview that he had persuaded Francis to articulate a new church teaching on aging that was also “proposed not with words but with the body” because, he said, “the old can teach us that we all are, in reality, fragile.”
“Aging is one of the great challenges of the 21st century,” added Paglia, who also presides over an Italian Health Minry commission for the reform of the health and social care of older people in Italy, which has one of the oldest populations in the world.
A United Nations report has predicted that people age 60 and over will exceed people under 15 2050.
Paglia said that advancements in longevity science and medicine extended life spans decades and created “a new population of old people.” But that also created a contradiction, he added, because a society obsessed with living longer had not changed to accommodate those of advanced age, either economically, politically or even spiritually.
Pope Francis visits a church in Lac Ste. Anne, Alberta, Canada, July 26, 2022. On a visit to Canada, the pontiff, 85, used his own vulnerability to demand dignity and respect for older people in a world increasingly populated them. (Ian Willms/The New York Times)
Starting even before he became pope at age 76, Francis has paid special attention to older people. In the book “On Heaven and Earth,” he said that ignoring the health needs of older people constituted “covert euthanasia” and that the aged often “end up being stored away in a nursing home like an overcoat that is hung up in the closet during the summer.”
As pope, he appeared in a Netflix documentary on aging, and he regularly denounces the way older people are treated like garbage in a “throwaway culture.”
In 2013, the year of his election, he used World Youth Day celebrations to honor older people. In a 2014 pre-Easter ritual meant to underline his service to humanity, he washed and kissed the feet of older and disabled people in wheelchairs. In 2021, he established an annual World Day for Grandparents and the Elderly to honor the “forgotten.”
That came during some of the worst days of the COVID pandemic and what Paglia said was a “massacre of the elderly” in Italian nursing homes that prompted his office to produce a “new paradigm” on caring for the old.
This year, Francis has sought to give shape to that thinking with a catechesis series, or religious instruction, on aging.
Spread out over 15 speeches, with three more expected in August, according to the Vatican, he has called the booming population of the old a “veritable new people” in human hory. “Never as many as now, never as much risk of being discarded,” he said.
He lamented a society in which youth had a monopoly on “the full meaning of life, while old age simply represents its emptying and loss.”
He decried a future in which technology, enchanted the “myth of eternal youth” and the “defeat of death,” seeks to “keep the body alive with medicine and cosmetics which slow down, hide, erase old age.”
Over the speeches, Francis urged people not to “hide the frailty of old age” out of a fear of a loss of dignity. Frailty, he argued, “is a teaching for all of us” and could bring about an “indispensable” reform in society, because “the marginalization of the elderly — both conceptual and practical — corrupts all seasons of life, not just that of old age.”
He has promoted dialogue between the young and old, championing the benefit of hearing hory directly from the people who lived it. He has also said that spending time with the old forces people to slow down, turn off their phones and follow a deeper clock.
“When you return home and there is a grandfather or grandmother who is perhaps no longer lucid or, I don’t know, has lost some of their ability to speak, and you stay with him or with her, you are ‘wasting time,’ but this ‘waste of time’ strengthens the human family,” he has said.
Exposure to decline and frailty, he noted, enriches the young. Reciprocally, he has said, “there is a gift in being elderly, understood as abandoning oneself to the care of others.”
Since his knee gave out, Francis has had to depend, at first seemingly reluctantly, on others to move around. And while his speeches draw heavily from the lessons of biblical figures, he has also peppered then with his own experiences “You’re telling me; I have to go around in a wheelchair, eh?” he said in one speech. “But that’s how it is, that’s life.”
If Francis still sometimes uses a cane, (“I think I can do it” he said about walking around to greet journals on the plane to Canada) he seems to have embraced the advantages of a wheelchair. After addressing a largely Indigenous congregation at an Edmonton church, he took a veritable joyride among the cheering faithful outside, causing a chaotic scene as his aide even popped a wheelie to lower him over a curb.
Crowds gather for Pope Francis’ arrival in Lac Ste. Anne, Alberta, Canada, July 26, 2022. On a visit to Canada, the pontiff, 85, used his own vulnerability to demand dignity and respect for older people in a world increasingly populated them. (Ian Willms/The New York Times)
Watching his joy in greeting the faithful, and his commitment to acknowledging the past sins of his church, made the possibility of resignation seem dant. But retirement, if not necessarily his own, has been on his mind.
In one of his teachings about aging, in Rome, he talked about making the most of retirement, especially when, because of the declining birthrates in many countries, there were fewer grandchildren to look after, and because adult children often moved away. Medical advances had therefore created years of time to fill, he noted.
“I will retire today,” he said, putting himself in a retiree’s shoes. “And will have many years ahead of me, and what can I do, in these years? How can I grow?”
Francis, who has also talked about the difficulty of leaving the role of “a protagon,” has said that if he did retire, he would become a bishop emeritus of Rome, probably reverting back to his given name, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, and hearing confessions in Rome’s basilica.
But for now, he clearly feels that he has a lot to say, and do, including a consory next month that will create cardinals who will help choose his successor and the direction of a church he is still trying to change.
On Tuesday in Lac Ste. Anne, his papal butler wheeled him to the lip of the lake, unlocked the pope’s footrests so his feet could touch the sacred ground and stepped back as Francis prayed alone.
Rochelle Knibb, 50, a Catholic from the Cree Nation, stood a few feet away with her mother, Margaret, 74, who wore a bandage on her arm.
“In our culture, we put our elders first. The pope does that too,” Knibb said, adding that she saw the face of all the old in his.
“People are taking care of him, which is good,” she said. “That’s what I want for our elders as well.”