“Nurses saved me”

Robaird O’Cearbhaill
Hong Kong Correspondent

In a radio interview with Spanish COPE, Pope Francis told how nurses saved his life – twice, recently, and in 1957. The Pope talked too about his recovery from surgery, his home confinement, and revealed too what and who helped bring about Laudato Si’.

Pope Francis responded with humour and irony to the first questions by Carlos Herrera “Holy Father, how are you feeling?

“I’m still alive. [Laughs]

“What was the Pope’s confinement like? What has the Pope done during the confinement?” Herrera asked.

“First, I have to put up with myself, which is not easy. It is a science that I still have to master. It’s hard to put up with oneself.”

“You have been practicing for many years…” Herrera said.

“Yes, but it is difficult. Sometimes a person is capricious with himself and wants things to come out automatically. Then I started to take things back little by little and, today, I am leading a normal life.”

In the past, he was uninterested in ecology. But now … “Why?” Herrera asked.

The pontiff said he was “shocked” at a 2007 conference where “Brazilian bishops talked about preserving nature, the ecological problem, the Amazon…. They insisted, insisted.”

“I became interested, and slowly I began to understand. I realized that I had to do something and writing something (on ecology).”

“I did not understand any of this. So I summoned a group of scientists to explain to me the real problems. They made me a nice catalogue. I passed on to theologians who reflected on it. And that is how Laudato si’ came about.”

“A nice anecdote: when I went to Strasbourg, President Hollande sent the Minister of the Environment, Mrs. Ségolène Royal, to receive me. And in the conversation, she said to me, ‘Is it true that you are writing something in my area?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I’m on this.’ ‘Please publish it before [the] Paris [summit] because we need endorsements.’ I came back from Strasbourg and sped up. And it came out before the Paris summit.”