Pope's condition stabalises, will remain in hospital

Pope John Paul’s condition stabilised today after he was rushed to hospital with breathing trouble, but the flu-stricken pontiff will spend several more days at the clinic, the Vatican said.

From Poland to the Philippines, believers prayed for his recovery.

Tests showed the 84-year-old Pope’s heart and respiration were normal, and he got several hours’ rest after being taken by ambulance to the hospital last night, said his spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls.

But he said John Paul was running a slight fever and would spend “a few more days” for treatment of respiratory problems at Rome’s Gemelli Polyclinic.

“There is no cause for alarm,” Navarro-Valls said.

In Rome, in John Paul’s native Poland and around the world, Roman Catholics paused to pray for the Pope. Rome’s chief rabbi, Riccarco Di Segni, said he offered prayers for a quick recovery.

“I wish the Holy Father good health,” said Maria Pasnik, 46, a housewife in the pope’s home town of Wadowice. “I know the situation has improved and I pray that we can see or hear him again.”

“Let’s all join the rest of the nation and the rest of Christendom in praying for the recovery of the Holy Father,” said Ignacio Bunye, spokesman for President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo of the Philippines, one of the 129 countries John Paul has visited in his 26 year papacy.

The Pope has Parkinson’s disease, and Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan, the Vatican’s top health official, said the slumping pontiff’s inability to hold his back up straight has left his lungs and diaphragm in a crushed position.

Navarro-Valls insisted the Pope had never lost consciousness and that he did not need a tracheotomy to insert a tube into his windpipe to help him breathe. He said John Paul participated from his hospital bed in a Mass celebrated by his secretary in the room.

Navarro-Valls characterised the hurried admission to a special papal suite on the tenth floor of the hospital as “mainly precautionary”. Trying to appear reassuring, Navarro-Valls even joked at one point that John Paul was taken by ambulance to the hospital because “the subway doesn’t go that far”.

Navarro-Valls, who has a medical degree, said earlier that the Pope has the flu and acute laryngeal tracheitis – inflammation of the windpipe – and had a “certain difficulty in breathing”.

He denied Italian news reports that John Paul had a CAT scan at the hospital and that he was taken to intensive care.

In a separate statement, the Vatican said the Pope also had experienced a “larynx spasm crisis”.

The spasms likely were a complication from the respiratory illness the pope has had. Experts said it was possible his Parkinson’s disease, which makes muscle control difficult, made it harder for him to breathe.

The first sign of the frail Pope’s illness came on Sunday, when he kept clearing his throat during a 20-minute appearance at his studio window, thrown wide open on one of Rome’s most bone-chilling days in years so he could release a pair of doves symbolising peace into St Peter’s Square.

The flu has been sweeping through Italy since December, and the Rome region has been among the hardest-hit. The Vatican declined to say whether the pontiff had a flu jab.

The Vatican cancelled the Pope’s general audience today along with other papal engagements, but pilgrims in Rome paused to remember John Paul in his hour of need.

“After we got the news we added a special prayer during our morning Mass,” said Bishop Szczepan Wesoly, who presided at the service at the Polish church near Piazza Venezia in the centre of the city attended by Polish nuns in black habits.

Security arrangements were among the tightest in memory at the hospital, a Roman Catholic teaching institution about 2.5 miles from the Vatican. The Pope has stayed there about half a dozen times, starting in 1981 when he was critically injured in an assassination attempt in St Peter’s Square.

The shutters on the windows of the Pope’s hospital suite were open just a crack.

When he was elected pontiff in 1978, John Paul was a robust 58-year-old with an athlete’s physique who was serving as Archbishop of Krakow in his native Poland, where he played soccer, skied and kayaked as a youth. Less than three years later, in May 1981, he suffered his first health crisis when he was shot by a Turkish gunman in the square.

Other serious medical problems requiring hospital treatment included a bowel tumour, described by doctors as benign and removed in 1992, intestinal problems which led to the 1996 removal of his appendix and a 1994 broken thigh bone, fractured in a fall in his bathroom.

The hospital suite includes a chapel, a kitchen and sleeping quarters for his long-time personal aide, Polish Bishop Stanislaw Dziwisz.

John Paul has been a patient so often at Gemelli that the hospital has been dubbed by the Italian press The Third Vatican after the seat of the Holy See on St. Peter’s Square and the pope’s summer residence in the town of Castel Gandolfo.