By Carol Glatz, Catholic News Service
[Vatican City – CNS] – Pope Francis marked Ash Wednesday on his 20th day in Rome’s Gemelli hospital by taking part in the rite of the blessing of the ashes and receiving them in a short prayer service, the Vatican said.
While the 88-year-old pope’s overall clinical case remained complex, his condition was “stable” and he did not experience any episodes of “respiratory insufficiency,” the Vatican said in its evening medical bulletin March 5.
The pope received ashes and the Eucharist in the morning from a celebrant, who was not named in the bulletin. It was most likely one of the hospital chaplains, a Vatican source said.
The rite was held in the private suite of rooms on the 10th floor of the hospital where the pope has been receiving treatment for double pneumonia and other respiratory ailments, the Vatican said.
The pope was diagnosed with double pneumonia Feb. 18 after being admitted to the hospital Feb. 14 for breathing difficulties. A Vatican source said the pneumonia is following a “normal evolution” that is expected to be seen in someone receiving treatment. Each case is different and “patience is needed” because the illness “does not disappear in one day,” the source said.
Pope Francis spent March 5 sitting in an armchair and increased the amount of “respiratory physiotherapy” he has been getting, which often consists of breathing exercises, as well as physiotherapy, the bulletin said. A source said a physiotherapist is working with him to help prevent any of the usual consequences that arise when a person has limited opportunities for movement while hospitalized.
“As scheduled, the pope receives high-flow oxygen” through a nasal cannula during the day, the bulletin said, and, at night, he wears a mask covering his nose and mouth for “noninvasive mechanical ventilation.”
Although the pope no longer needed oxygen through a breathing mask during the day March 4 and 5, a Vatican source has said mechanical ventilation is used at night so he can sleep better.
Also March 5 he telephoned Fr. Gabriel Romanelli, parish priest of Holy Family Church in Gaza. The pope spent the afternoon alternating between working and resting, the bulletin said.
A woman joins hundreds of people praying the rosary for Pope Francis in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican on Ash Wednesday, March 5, 2025. (Photo by Pablo Esparza, CNS)
Because of the continued complexity of his case, his doctors continue to hold that his “prognosis remains guarded.”
The Vatican had said in the morning that the pope had rested well overnight and had woken up a bit after 8 a.m. It was the first time doctors had communicated the waking time of the pope, whose normal schedule had been waking as early as 4 or 5 a.m. for prayer and reflection.
Pope Francis had suffered “two episodes of acute respiratory insufficiency” March 3, which occurs when the lungs are unable to effectively take in sufficient oxygen or expel enough carbon dioxide to meet the body’s needs.
Those crises led doctors to put the pope back on “noninvasive mechanical ventilation” — a treatment that delivers air with added oxygen through a tightly fitted face mask and using positive pressure to assist breathing. He also underwent two bronchoscopies that day but “remained alert, oriented and cooperative at all times,” the Vatican said.
Cardinal Angelo De Donatis, head of the Apostolic Penitentiary, a church court, led the traditional Ash Wednesday celebration that usually is presided over by the pope. The celebration March 5 began with a penitential procession from the Benedictine monastery of St. Anselm on Rome’s Aventine Hill and to the Dominican-run Basilica of Santa Sabina, followed by Mass and the distribution of ashes.
The cardinal read the homily prepared by Pope Francis, however, he prefaced his reading by saying, “We are deeply united” with the pope, and “we thank him for offering his prayer and his sufferings for the good of the whole church and the entire world.”
The Vatican also announced that the pope would not be present for the March 8-9 Jubilee for Volunteers, and that the Mass March 9 would be presided over by Cardinal Michael Czerny, prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development. About 25,000 people from more than 100 countries were expected to attend.
Cardinal Marcello Semeraro, prefect of the Dicastery for Saints’ Causes, was scheduled to lead the nightly recitation of the rosary for Pope Francis in St. Peter’s Square March 5.
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Pope text: Ash Wednesday teaches human fragility, Gospel hope
By Cindy Wooden, Catholic News Service
[Vatican City] – The journey of Lent “unfolds amid the remembrance of our fragility and the hope that, at the end of the road, the Risen Lord is waiting for us,” Pope Francis wrote in his homily for Ash Wednesday.
“Indeed, the ashes help to remind us that our lives are fragile and insignificant: we are dust, from dust we were created, and to dust we shall return,” said the pope’s text.
Although the 88-year-old pope was still in Rome’s Gemelli hospital March 5, the day Latin-rite Catholics received ashes and began their Lenten observances, the Vatican released what it said was the homily he prepared for the occasion.
Cardinal Angelo De Donatis, head of the Apostolic Penitentiary, a church court, read Pope Francis’ homily as he led the Ash Wednesday celebration usually presided over by the pope.
The cardinal prefaced his reading, though, by saying, “We are deeply united” with Pope Francis, and “we thank him for offering his prayer and his sufferings for the good of the whole church and the entire world.”
The pope, who has been hospitalized since Feb. 14, delegated Cardinal De Donatis to preside over the rites.
The celebration began with the traditional penitential procession that leads from the Benedictine monastery of St. Anselm on Rome’s Aventine Hill and goes to the Dominican-run Basilica of Santa Sabina, followed by Mass and the distribution of ashes.
Cardinals, bishops, dozens of Benedictine monks and nuns and Dominican friars and sisters took part in the procession and Mass.
Pope Francis, in the homily he had prepared, said people learn how fleeting earthly life is from their “fragility through illness, poverty and the hardships that can suddenly befall us and our families.”
They also see it, though, in their experiences of weariness, weaknesses, fears and failure, the pope wrote.
But the experience of fragility is not only individual, he wrote. “We also experience it when, in the social and political realities of our time, we find ourselves exposed to the ‘fine dust’ that pollutes our world,” including through the abuse of power, “ideologies based on identity that advocate exclusion,” war, violence and the exploitation of the earth’s resources.
Those forms of “toxic dust,” he said, can pollute “the air of our planet impeding peaceful coexistence, while uncertainty and the fear of the future continue to increase.”
A sense of fragility also leads people to try to hide or ignore the fact that everyone dies, he said. “Death, however, imposes itself as a reality with which we have to reckon, a sign of the precariousness and brevity of our lives.”
But for Christians, the pope wrote, ashes and even death are signs of hope, too.
“We are invited to lift our eyes to the One who rises from the depths of death and brings us from the ashes of sin and death to the glory of eternal life,” Pope Francis wrote.
Christ’s death and resurrection “is the hope that restores to life the ‘ashes’ of our lives,” he wrote. “Without such hope, we are doomed passively to endure the fragility of our human condition.”
“The hope of Easter that we journey toward reassures us of God’s forgiveness,” the text added. “Even while submerged in the ashes of sin, hope opens us up to the joyful acknowledgement of life.”
The call of Lent, Pope Francis wrote, is a call to turn to the Lord and so become “a sign of hope for the world.”
The papal text also encouraged Catholics to follow the traditional Lenten practices of almsgiving, prayer and fasting.
Almsgiving, the pope said, teaches a person to look beyond themselves, meet the needs of others and, in that way, nurture “the hope of a fairer world.”
Prayer is a reminder, “as Jacques Maritain put it, that we are ‘beggars for heaven'” and hope that God is “waiting for us with open arms at the end of our earthly pilgrimage,” he wrote.
“Finally,” the pope wrote, “let us learn from fasting that we do not live merely to satisfy our needs, but that, hungry for love and truth, only the love of God and of one another can truly satisfy us and give us hope for a better future.”
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© OSV News / Our Sunday Visitor, Inc. 2025 – from CNS Vatican bureau, used with permission.
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