c. 2005 Religion News Service

VATICAN CITY _ Pope John Paul II is gradually recovering from a severe breathing crisis caused by influenza and may be able to leave the hospital next week, the Vatican said Thursday (Feb. 3).

Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls, who has degrees in medicine and psychiatry, issued an optimistic medical bulletin on the second full day of the pope’s hospitalization.

“The Holy Father rested well and slept all night, and laboratory tests performed so far have all given satisfactory results,” Navarro-Valls told reporters at Rome’s Agostino Gemelli Polyclinic hospital. He indicated that he expected the 84-year-old Roman Catholic pontiff to spend about a week in all in the hospital.

The pope came down with influenza Sunday and was rushed to the hospital by ambulance Tuesday night when he developed severe problems swallowing and breathing.

Navarro-Valls said it would be up to John Paul’s medical team to decide when he could be discharged. “My personal experience when I had the flu,” he said, “was that it lasts seven days or a week. You choose.”

In the medical bulletin he issued at the Vatican later, Navarro-Valls said the pope’s general condition and his breathing showed “a positive evolution.”

“The acute laryngeal tracheitis is in a phase of regression, and there are no longer repetitions of the episodes of larynx spasm, which motivated the urgent hospitalization,” he said. “The Holy Father spent a night of tranquil rest.”

Laryngeal tracheitis is an inflammation of the trachea, or wind pipe, through which breath passes to the lungs. The resulting spasms of the larynx, the upper part of the trachea, cut off the pope’s breath.

The next bulletin will be issued at midday Friday, the spokesman said.

Vatican officials said that even if he returns to the Vatican early next week, the pope would not hold a scheduled audience with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. She will meet instead with Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Vatican secretary of state.

Around the world, Catholics and non-Catholics alike have been praying for the pope’s recovery, with get-well messages and flowers pouring into the hospital. Two of the most unusual were a huge bouquet of roses and orchids from the Libyan Embassy and a fax from Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turkist terrorist who shot John Paul during a 1981 audience in St. Peter’s Square.

Writing from the prison to which he was extradited in 2000, Agca said that both he and John Paul had “suffered for the carrying out of a divine universal design” and asked the pope to confirm that the end of the world was near. The pope has visited Agca in prison and forgave him for the attempted assassination.

John Paul has suffered since the late 1980s from Parkinson’s disease, a neurological complaint that has affected his vocal chords and his ability to swallow saliva. Doctors said this has increased his susceptibility to influenza and tracheal infections.

Paolo Maria Rossini, a neurologist at Rome’s Biomedico Campus, warned that a prolonged fever would be dangerous for John Paul because it would make it difficult for him to absorb medicine for Parkinson’s disease. Rossini spoke on “Porta a Porta,” a prime-time Italian television program, which devoted Wednesday night to the pope’s illness.

“It is necessary to be very attentive to the risk of bronco-pulmonary infections and to keep the temperature low because a high fever brings muscular rigidity and this, in a vicious circle, provokes further raising of the temperature,” Rossini said.

It was the seventh time the pope has been a patient in the Gemelli, a large Catholic teaching hospital located about 21/2 miles from the Vatican. The hospital reserves a three-room suite on the 10th floor for him at all times.

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The Gemelli gave the pope life-saving emergency care when he was shot in the abdomen in an attempted assassination in 1981. He has spent a total of 136 days there, undergoing surgery to remove a pre-cancerous colon tumor in 1992, mend a fractured shoulder in 1993 and a broken femur in 1994, both suffered in falls, and remove his appendix in 1996.

A team of 10 doctors cares for the pope. It is headed by Rodolfo Proietti, 59, a specialist in resuscitation and director of the Emergency Department of Catholic University. Renato Buzzonetti, 81, an internist who has been John Paul’s private physician since he was elected pope in 1978, is also in attendance.

Although the papal apartment in the Apostolic Palace is equipped for medical emergencies, Buzzonetti determined that the seriousness of John Paul’s complaint required hospitalization.

John Paul’s two Polish secretaries, Archbishop Stanislao Dziwisz and Monsignor Mieczyslaw Mokrzycki, whom the pope knew when he was archbishop of Krakow, and the Polish nuns who keep house for him also accompanied him to the hospital.

The Vatican Press Room has continued to issue daily bulletins. A bulletin for Thursday contained a message the pope had prepared for members of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences meeting to study the “signs of death” required to permit the removal of organs for transplant.

Noting that the Catholic Church has encouraged organ donation under “ethical conditions,” the pope urged the scientists to consider Church teaching along with “the data supplied by” science, anthropological considerations and ethical reflection.

The Gemelli hospital chaplain, the Rev. Decio Cipolloni, scheduled an annual Mass for patients with eye, nose and throat ailments Thursday because it was the Feast of St. Blaise to whom Catholics pray for protection against throat ailments.

“It is clear that we will think of the pope. We think of him continually, especially now, but we think also of all the other patients,” he said.

MO/PH END RNS