Prevost takes back the reins, the agenda and the next commitments

A quick hospitalization with the resignation decided even earlier than expected. He was scheduled to stay in hospital for a week after the operation to remove part of his lung, but Leone anticipated it with a public outing on foot, accompanied by an energetic greeting to the crowd and even, before getting into the car towards the Vatican, a private conversation lasting several minutes with a young Ukrainian woman who was also being treated in Italy for cancer.

Leo's desire to send signals thus appeared clear upon leaving Gemini. In two directions: to the world, committed as it is to promoting dialogue and humanitarian intervention in war scenarios such as the Ukrainian one addressed firsthand yesterday in a completely unprecedented phone call from the hospital with Russian President Vladimir Putin born from his impulse. And to the Roman Curia, where in a soft and less accentuated way than it had been for Pope Francis, rumors and barbs were already beginning to spread which for some even brought to mind the pre-conclave air breathed just a year and a half ago.

None of this. With his exit in favor of the cameras, passing through a real crowd, Prevost wanted to mark that the government of the Church is firmly in his hands. He worked from the hospital while also facing recovery and received the urgent dossiers from the hands of the Substitute, Msgr. Paolo Rudelli, as well as the courtesy visits of the new dean, the Philippine cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle and the Vicar of Rome, Baldo Reina. There remain unknowns that he has not resolved about his next commitments even if the surgeon who operated on him, Stefano Margaritora, was reassuring about his health conditions: for his part, there were no preclusions to travel beyond the normal recovery times.

Before the intervention, the Vatican press office had made it known that all the Pope's audiences and commitments are canceled until October 20th. The Pope's first important outing on the program would be the interreligious meeting in Assisi convened for 27 October, 40 years after the one promoted by John Paul II, even if Leone's presence had never been officially announced by the Vatican, and then the very demanding November trip between Uruguay, Argentina and Peru.

Yesterday the Vatican press office published the list of those admitted to the papal flight. A gesture interpreted in the sense of a determination to move forward without variations and without "remodulations" as the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, had carelessly suggested, who was then forced to half-backtrack. A gaffe by the Secretary of State in which someone wanted to read a distance between the two, exacerbated by the fact that Parolin took part in a conference held at the Cattolica, just a hundred meters from the room where the Pontiff was hospitalized, without this leading to a meeting between the two. Leone followed the scheme: as per protocol, close to the Pope are first the Dean of the Sacred College and then the Vicar of Rome. A scheme that he himself relaunched, making it the imprint of his pontificate: thus the times in which, outside the box, Pius XII and Paul VI called the Secretary of State the Pope's "first" collaborator also seem to be waning.