Bouquets of flowers are left by visitors to St. Peter’s Square on Easter Monday following the news of the death of Pope Francis, Monday, April 21, 2025. / Credit: Kristina Millare/CNA
Vatican City, Apr 21, 2025 / 14:53 pm (CNA).
The Holy See on Monday evening released the death certificate detailing the cause of death of Pope Francis, who died in his Vatican apartment at 7:35 a.m. in Rome on April 21, the day after Easter.
After an examination, Vatican physician Dr. Andrea Arcangeli determined the pope died from a stroke, coma, and irreversible cardiovascular collapse, according to the death certificate published just over 12 hours after Francis’ death.
According to the certificate, compounding factors included Francis’ previous episode of acute respiratory failure from bilateral pneumonia, the chronic disease called bronchiectasis (the permanent enlargement of parts of airways of the lungs), hypertension, and type II diabetes.
Arcangeli, the director of the Vatican’s health and hygiene service, said the cause of death was determined through an EKG.
The Vatican physician is also responsible for ensuring the pontiff’s remains are appropriately preserved so that public exposition of the corpse can be carried out “with the greatest decorum and respect.”
On the evening of April 21, Cardinal Kevin Farrell, the camerlengo, presided over the “rite of the ascertainment of death and deposition in the coffin” in the chapel of Pope Francis’ Vatican residence, the Casa Santa Marta, in which special prayers are said for the pope and his body is dressed in vestments and placed in a coffin.
The College of Cardinals will begin meetings, called general congregations, on April 22 to plan the papal funeral and to make decisions related to the governance of the Church and the running of the Vatican during the sede vacante, or period without a pope.
If you value the news and views Catholic World Report provides, please consider donating to support our efforts. Your contribution will help us continue to make CWR available to all readers worldwide for free, without a subscription. Thank you for your generosity!
Click here for more information on donating to CWR. Click here to sign up for our newsletter.
CNA Staff, Jun 1, 2024 / 04:00 am (CNA).
Pope Francis’ prayer intention for the month of June is for those fleeing their homelands.“Dear brothers and sisters, this month I would like us to pray for people fleeing thei… […]
Pope Francis speaking at the general audience on St. Peter’s Square, Nov. 9, 2022 / Daniel Ibáñez / CNA
Rome Newsroom, Nov 9, 2022 / 03:34 am (CNA).
Pope Francis said Wednesday his trip to the Gulf kingdom of Bahrain was a new step on the journey to create “fraternal alliances” between Christians and Muslims.
The pope spoke about his Nov. 3-6 visit to Bahrain, a small, overwhelmingly Muslim country in the Persian Gulf, during his weekly public audience in St. Peter’s Square Nov. 9.
“The journey to Bahrain should not be seen as an isolated episode,” he said. “It was part of a process initiated by Saint John Paul II when he went to Morocco.”
This is why, he continued, “the first visit of a pope in Bahrain represents a new step on the journey between Christian and Muslim believers — not to confuse things or water down the faith, but to create fraternal alliances in the name of our Father Abraham, who was a pilgrim on earth under the merciful gaze of the one God of Heaven, the God of peace.”
“And why do I say that dialogue does not water down [the faith]?” Francis said. “Because to dialogue you have to have your own identity, you have to start from your identity. If you do not have identity, you cannot dialogue, because you do not understand what you are either.”
The Papal Swiss Guard at St. Peter’s Square, Nov. 9, 2022. Daniel Ibáñez / CNA
The motto of Pope Francis’ visit to Bahrain was “Peace on earth to people of goodwill.” The trip included encounters with government officials, Muslim leaders, and the small Catholic community, including a Mass with around 30,000 people in Bahrain’s national soccer stadium.
The small Christian minority in Bahrain is mostly made up of immigrants, especially from India and the Philippines.
More than 70% of the total population — 1.5 million — is Muslim, while there are only about 161,000 Catholics living in the country, according to 2020 Vatican statistics.
Pope Francis said Wednesday it was “marvelous” to see the many Christian immigrants in Bahrain.
“The brothers and sisters in the faith, whom I met in Bahrain, truly live ‘on a journey,’” he said. “For the most part, they are immigrant laborers who, far from home, discover their roots in the People of God and their family within the larger family of the Church. And they move ahead joyfully, in the certainty that the hope of God does not disappoint.”
The pope pointed out that the Kingdom of Bahrain is an archipelago of 33 islands, which “helps us understand that it is not necessary to live by isolating ourselves, but by coming closer” — something which aids peace.
He said “dialogue is the ‘oxygen of peace,’” not only in a nation but also in a family: Dialogue can help bring peace to a husband and wife who are fighting, for example.
Throughout his visit to Bahrain, Francis said, he heard several times the desire to increase encounters and strengthen the relationship between Christians and Muslims in the country.
He recalled a custom in that part of the world to place one’s hand on the heart when greeting another person. “I did this too,” he said, “to make room inside me for the person I was meeting.”
“For without this welcome, dialogue remains empty, illusory, it remains on the level of an idea rather than reality,” he said.
Francis encouraged Catholics to have “open hearts,” not closed, hard hearts, and said he would like to transmit the “genuine, simple, and beautiful joy” of the Christian priests, religious, and lay people he met in Bahrain.
“Meeting each other and praying together, we felt we were of one heart and one soul,” he said.
At the beginning of the general audience, Pope Francis drew attention to two “courageous” children who had approached the platform where he was sitting.
These children “didn’t ask permission, they didn’t say, ‘Ah, I’m afraid’ — they came directly,” he said. “They gave us an example of how we are to be with God, with the Lord: go for it.”
“He is always waiting for us,” he continued. “It did me good to see the trust of these two children: it was an example for all of us. This is how we must always approach the Lord: with freedom.”
Pope Francis in St. Peter’s Square, June 25, 2022 / Daniel Ibanez/CNA
Vatican City, Jul 1, 2022 / 10:26 am (CNA).
In an interview published Friday, Pope Francis said that he believes it is time to rethink the concept of “just war.”
“I believe it is time to rethink the concept of a ‘just war.’ A war may be just, there is the right to defend oneself. But we need to rethink the way that the concept is used nowadays,” Pope Francis said.
“I have said that the use and possession of nuclear weapons are immoral. Resolving conflicts through war is saying no to verbal reasoning, to being constructive. … War is essentially a lack of dialogue.”
The pope spoke in an interview that was conducted on June 20 by Télam, Argentina’s national news agency. A 1-hour video of the interview was published on July 1.
In response to a question about how the lack of dialogue is an aggravating factor in the current state of world affairs, the pope said that there is “an entire infrastructure of arms sales” that supports war today.
“A person who knew about statistics told me, I don’t remember the numbers well, that if weapons were not manufactured for a year, there would be no hunger in the world,” he said.
Pope Francis described how he cried during visits to war cemeteries in Europe, including the Redipuglia World War I memorial and Anzio World War II cemetery in Italy.
“And when the anniversary of the landing in Normandy was commemorated, I thought of the 30,000 boys who were left dead on the beach. They opened the boats and said, ‘get off, get off,’ they were ordered while the Nazis waited for them. Is that justified? Visiting military cemeteries in Europe helps one realize this,” he said.
The pope also said that the situation in Europe today shows that the United Nations “has no power” to stop a war.
“After World War II, trust was placed in the United Nations. It is not my intention to offend anybody, I know there are very good people working there, but at this point, the UN has no power to assert,” he said.
“It does help to avoid wars — and I am thinking of Cyprus, where there are Argentine troops. But to stop a war, to solve a conflict situation like the one we are living today in Europe, or like the ones lived in other parts of the world, it has no power.”
Church teaching on the morality of war is based on a theory expounded by St. Augustine in the 4th century known as just war theory and recognizes a potentially just reason to engage in war under certain conditions.
Theologians told CNA in 2019 that applying this theory to modern warfare, which often involves missile and air strikes rather than pitched battles between troops, is more complicated, yet normative.
The papal interview touched on a number of themes, including the Covid-19 pandemic, intergenerational dialogue, and climate change.
“You can rest assured that God always forgives, and we, men, forgive every now and then. But nature never forgives. It pays us back. If we use nature for our profit, it will bear down on us. A warmed-up world prevents the construction of a fraternal and just society,” the pope said.
When asked about the Catholic Church in Latin America, the pope said that it has a long history of being “close to the people.”
Pope Francis said: “In a way, this is the experience of the Latin American Church, although there have been attempts of ideologization, such as the use of Marxist concepts in the analysis of reality by Liberation Theology. That was an ideological exploitation …”
“There is a difference between the people and populisms,” he added.
Leave a Reply