Pope Francis briefly went to a hospital for tests and returned to the Vatican, witnesses and news reports have said, two months after he was hospitalised with an acute case of bronchitis.
“Pope Francis went to the Gemelli hospital this morning to undergo some health checks and returned to the Vatican before midday,” said Vatican spokesperson Matteo Bruni.
Witnesses at the Vatican’s Perugino gate, one of the main entrances to the city state, said Francis greeted guards as he usually does when he returned to the Vatican.
Francis, 86, spent three days at Gemelli hospital after being admitted in late March. Initially, the Vatican said he had gone in for scheduled tests but the pontiff later revealed he had felt pain in his chest and was rushed to the hospital where bronchitis was diagnosed. He was put on intravenous antibiotics and released on 1 April, quipping that he was “still alive”.
The Argentinian pope had part of one lung removed when he was a young man. He also suffers from sciatica nerve pain and has been using a wheelchair and walker for more than a year because of strained ligaments in his knee.
Francis has had a packed schedule of late, with multiple audiences each day. The Vatican has recently confirmed a travel-filled August, with a four-day visit to Portugal in the first week and a similarly long trip to Mongolia starting on 31 August.
In a sign that the trips were still on, on Tuesday the Vatican released the planned itinerary for Francis’s visit to Portugal for World Youth Day events from 2 to 6 August. The itinerary confirms a typically busy schedule that includes all the protocol meetings of an official state visit plus several events with young people and a day trip to the Marian shrine at Fatima.
Francis’s next public appointment, if confirmed, would be his weekly general audience on Wednesday in St Peter’s Square.
Additional reporting by Angela Giuffrida in Rome
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