The pope is never sick until he’s dead, goes an old Roman saying. So it happened that when commentators reported in August 1914 that Pope Pius X had a cold, the official Vatican newspaper issued a furious denial.
Less than 24 hours later, Pius was dead.
Given the Vatican’s legendary secretiveness, many were alarmed when one of John Paul II’s closest advisers acknowledged publicly that the pope was in poor health and asked the faithful to pray for him.
For Catholics already saddened and disconcerted by recent images of the ailing, 83-year-old pontiff unable to lift his head, the anxiety was ratcheted up several notches Tuesday, no matter how much the Vatican insists John Paul remains in charge.
“The big question on Catholics’ minds is who’s running the show,” said one lay Catholic on Long Island, N.Y., who asked not to be named.
In fact, the decline of the once vigorous pope poses potentially unprecedented questions for the 2,000-year-old church. At a time when modern medicine can keep the body alive far longer than the mind can function well, many worry about what would happen if John Paul became mentally incapacitated or lapsed into a coma without having either resigned or delegated his authority.
While the church has elaborate rules for papal elections, it has virtually no provisions for determining how or under what circumstances a living pope might be deemed mentally incapable.
“The U.S. Constitution has the 25th Amendment that tells us what to do if the president becomes disabled,” said the Rev. Thomas Reese, editor of America, a Catholic monthly, who has written several books about the Catholic hierarchy.
“The Catholic Church has nothing like that. As long as the pope can communicate, he could resign. But if he can’t do that, we’re in real trouble. It could cause a constitutional crisis in the church.
“In the bad, old days, they would just bump him off or put him in a back room and run the church without him, and no one would know the difference,” Reese said. “But today, because so much authority has been centralized in the papacy, there could be a real crisis.”
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