Power tends to show itself incapable of assuming sickness and old age.
He denies and covers them up.
Americans knew that the great Franklin Delano Roosevelt, elected to four terms, couldn't walk, but they weren't very aware of it because they never saw a picture of the president in a wheelchair: the secret service handled prying photographers.
France, as in many other things, offers good examples.
When the riots of 1968 broke out, President Charles de Gaulle was suffering from senility.
He fled to Germany with no intention of returning.
His prime minister, Georges Pompidou, later recognized him: De Gaulle was incapacitated.
But until his resignation, in 1969, both Pompidou himself and the rest of the presidential environment denied that there was the slightest problem with the health of the old general.
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The crushing shadow of General de Gaulle
With Pompidou, a reasonably sincere man in all but his clinical picture, the same thing happened.
When he was elected president, in 1969, he already knew that he had Waldenström's disease, a type of blood cancer, but he hid it.
For five years, the French watched him swell and deflate from cortisone treatments and frequently absent from his office (“recurring flu”, it was said);
no one dared to publish the truth, even though it was obvious that the real president was Édouard Balladur, Secretary General of the Presidency.
When he was already hospitalized and in agony, the Elysée Palace issued a statement according to which Pompidou suffered "a benign lesion" in his anus.
His environment had the grace to sit him up in bed, put a lit cigarette in his mouth,
cassoulet
”.
He died two years before the end of his seven-year term.
François Mitterrand promised in his 1981 election campaign that he would regularly publish reports on his health.
He did not do it.
The French were slow to learn that he was suffering from prostate cancer and only after Mitterrand's death in January 1996, months after completing his second term, did they find out that he could barely work an hour a day.
This phenomenon of denial was for centuries one more among the Vatican rites.
The motto "the Pope dies, but does not get sick" was appealed to.
John XXIII's cancer was rigorously hidden.
Instead, John Paul II wanted his agony to be public.
He experienced her as something mystical and wanted to set an example with her suffering.
She was seen dying, angelus by angelus.
But power, exercised in recent months by Secretary Stanislaw Dziwisz, spokesman Joaquín Navarro Valls and, to a lesser extent, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, behaved as usual.
A few days before the death of the pope, Navarro Valls proclaimed: "The Supreme Pontiff had a plate of sausages for dinner last night with a good appetite."
The affair was very unedifying.
Lies never are.
Karol Wojtyla tended to be unconcerned with the management of the Vatican and during his long illness it degenerated into chaos, a whirlwind of corruption that would end up ruining the next papacy, that of Ratzinger.
The resignation of Benedict XVI prevented a similar situation from recurring.
Jorge Bergoglio, Francisco, a pragmatic 86-year-old man, will most likely do the same as his predecessor.
The announcement shouldn't be long.
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