THE POPE is being urged by senior church figures to cut back further on his already diminished workload as realisation grows in the Vatican that he is too old and frail to make a full recovery.

Vatican officials said yesterday that John Paul II, who is 84, would not be well enough to read out today’s Angelus prayers or even appear at the windows of his room in the Gemelli hospital in Rome.

Doctors have advised the Pope not to speak to help him recover from an emergency operation on Thursday in which a tube was inserted into his throat to help him breathe. His only means of expression is writing.

Breaking the Vatican’s traditional reserve on such matters, senior Cardinal Mario Francesco Pompedda, an expert in canon law, said John Paul should delegate more power in the management of the Church.

He told an Italian newspaper: “I would see nothing wrong with certain bodies, which already exist, being used in a greater fashion to lighten the Pope’s burden in the universal government of the Church.”

He said that a greater say could be given to assemblies of cardinals and the heads of Vatican congregations and other departments.

The Pope has repeatedly made clear that he has no intention of resigning, but age and ill health, including Parkinson’s disease, arthritis and the effects of repeated surgery have forced him to scale back his workload.

Vatican sources said that even before he was admitted to hospital last week the Pope was incapable of writing anything longer than a sentence or two. One cardinal who refused to be named said the pontiff was working only three hours a day.

The Pope’s illness has created a power vacuum, with the Church effectively run by Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the secretary of state, and Archbishop Stanislaw Dziwisz, the Pope’s personal secretary.

There have been questions about whether the Pope returned to the Vatican too soon after suffering breathing difficulties brought on by influenza earlier this month.

Professor Corrado Manni, who first treated the Pope after the failed assassination attempt on him in 1981 and was his chief anaesthetist until 1996, said that if he had remained in hospital, his doctors could have kept him under observation. The Pope, he said, would have pressed them to discharge him.

“Now he will be wanting to go back to the Vatican,” he said. “But he must stay at the Gemelli because there are clearly more facilities for treating him in an emergency than in an apartment, even if it’s a papal apartment.”

Manni predicted that it could be weeks or even months before the tracheotomy tube would be removed from the Pope’s throat. Doctors who have treated him in the past expect him to lose the ability to speak in public within six months to two years.

John Allen, a Vatican specialist for the Catholic News Service, said that if the Church had been a multinational corporation and the Pope its chief executive, the board of directors would have asked for his resignation long ago. “But the Church says he is teaching the world a lesson by bearing his suffering with dignity,” he said.

Additional reporting: Christopher Morgan

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