Vatican City
Reuters
Pope Francis is not thinking of resigning and is living “a totally normal life” following intestinal surgery in July, he said in a radio interview broadcast on Wednesday.
Speaking to Spanish radio network COPE, Francis, 84, dismissed an Italian newspaper report that he might step down, saying: “I don’t know where they got it from last week that I was going to resign…it didn’t even cross my mind.”
He also said he was almost certain to attend the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow in November.
Pope Francis and journalist Carlos Herrera talk during an interview with Spanish radio station COPE at the Vatican City in this picture released on 1st September. PICTURE: Carlos Herrera en COPE/Handout via Reuters
In the interview, the Pope thanked a male nurse at the Vatican for convincing him to undergo surgery to remove part of his colon rather than continuing treatment with antibiotics and other medicines, as some doctors had favoured.
“He saved my life,” the Pope said.
POPE INADVERTANTLY QUOTES PUTIN TO CHIDE WEST’S AFGHAN WAR
Pope Francis has criticised the West’s two-decade-long involvement in Afghanistan as an outsider’s attempt to impose democracy – although he did it by citing Russian President Vladimir Putin while thinking he was quoting German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Asked during a radio interview aired Wednesday about the new political map taking shape in Afghanistan after the United States and its allies withdrew from the Taliban-controlled country following 20 years of war, the Pope said he would answer with a quote that he attributed to Merkel, whom he described as “one of the world’s greatest political figures”.
“It is necessary to put an end to the irresponsible policy of intervening from outside and building democracy in other countries, ignoring the traditions of the peoples,” the Pope said, using his own translation into Spanish.
But the words were spoken last month by Putin in the presence of Merkel, during her visit to Moscow.
During the meeting on 20th August, Putin scathingly criticised the West over Afghanistan, saying that the Taliban’s rapid sweep over the country has shown the futility of Western attempts to enforce its own vision of democracy. At a news conference with Putin, Merkel conceded that the operation had failed in delivering a clear future for Afghans.
“We did not want to force any system on Afghanistan,” Merkel told reporters. “But we saw that millions of girls were glad to go to school and that women could participate. There are many in Afghanistan who are very, very unhappy about developments now.”
Her spokesman, Steffen Seibert, refused to comment directly on the Pope’s comments when asked on Wednesday, but he added that Merkel’s position on Afghanistan was well known and repeated during a recent speech to the German parliament.
The goal of no international terror attacks from Afghanistan since the military operation started in 2001 “was achieved,” Merkel told German lawmakers on Aug. 25: “That was a concrete contribution to the safety of our country.”
Although she acknowledged that the West’s goals may have been too ambitious and cultural differences and corruption may have been underestimated, she also said that the mission in Afghanistan “wasn’t futile” for the country’s population, as it helped reduce child mortality, deliver drinking water and electricity to a majority of Afghans and protected rule of law and the basic rights of women and others.
Merkel said the analysis of what went wrong would take time and each international mission would need to be assessed on its own, but she added that “we must not and won’t forget Afghanistan, because even if it doesn’t look like it in this bitter hour I’m convinced that no violence and no ideology will stop people’s urge toward freedom, justice and peace forever.”
The Vatican didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment on the Pope’s interview with Spain’s Cadena COPE, which took place Friday at his residence. The radio station owned by Spain’s Catholic bishops’ conference aired the talk on Wednesday and said that its content had been vetted by the Pope himself.
Francis also said that “not all eventualities were taken into account” in the departure of Western allies from Afghanistan.
“I don’t know whether there will be a review or not [about what happened during the withdrawal], but certainly there was a lot of deception perhaps on the part of the new [Afghan] authorities,” said the Pope. “I say deceit or a lot of naivety.”
He said he believed that the Vatican’s top diplomat was offering to engage in Afghanistan to make sure that locals don’t suffer and called for Christians across the world to engage in “prayer, penance and fasting” in the face of events in Afghanistan.
– ARITZ PARRA and FRANK JORDANS in Madrid, Spain, with FRANCES D’EMILIO in Rome, Italy, and VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV in Moscow, Russia, AP.
Francis, who was elected pontiff in 2013, underwent surgery on 4th July and spent 11 days in hospital. He had been suffering from a severe case of symptomatic diverticular stenosis, a narrowing of the colon.
“Now I can eat everything, which was not possible before…I lead a totally normal life,” he said, adding that 33 centimetres of his intestine was removed.
He further dismissed the report of his potential resignation by outlining his full schedule, with a trip to Hungary and Slovakia on 12th to 15th September and visits to Cyprus, Greece and Malta in the pipeline as well his planned attendance at COP26.
Newspaper Libero reported on 23rd August that there was “a conclave in the air” at the Vatican – a reference to the secret meeting at which cardinals choose a new pope when the incumbent dies or resigns. It said Francis had spoken of resigning, possibly to coincide with his 85th birthday in December.
“Whenever a pope is ill there is always a breeze or a hurricane about a conclave,” he told COPE.
Elsewhere in the interview, the Pope defended the Vatican deal with China’s communist government on the appointment of Catholic bishops, saying an uneasy dialogue is better than no dialogue at all.
He compared the Vatican’s dialogue with China to those with East European countries during the Cold War which eventually resulted in many freedoms for the church there.
“China is not easy, but I am convinced that we should not give up dialogue,” he said in some of his most comprehensive comments to date on the issue.
Last September, the Vatican renewed a 2018 accord with Beijing that gives the pope final say over the appointment of Chinese bishops. The deal established a formal dialogue with Beijing after decades during which Chinese Catholics faithful to the pope were driven underground.
Critics, including the administration of former US president Donald Trump, tried to convince the Vatican to abandon the pact, saying it compromised the pope’s moral authority.
Comments by former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo last September, which the Vatican saw as meddling in its sovereign affairs, sparked a minor diplomatic crisis.
“You can be deceived in dialogue, you can make mistakes, all that…but it is the way. Closed-mindedness is never the way,” the Pope said of the China deal, which has been particularly opposed by conservative Catholic groups.
“What has been achieved so far in China was at least dialogue…some concrete things like the appointment of new bishops, slowly…but these are also steps that can be questionable,” he said.
Francis likened relations with Beijing to the “small steps” policy carried out by Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, a renowned Vatican diplomat, with Soviet Bloc countries in Eastern Europe, staring in the 1960s.
Casaroli, who served under three popes, reached agreements with communist countries that gave the Church some breathing space, sowing the seeds for full relations after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Those deals were also criticised.
“Slowly, slowly, slowly, he [Casaroli] was achieving reserves of diplomatic relations which in the end meant appointing new bishops and taking care of God’s faithful people,” Francis said.
– Additional reporting by INTI LANDAURO in Madrid.
