Doctor Sergio Alfieri, chief surgeon at Agostino Gemelli hospital, speaks about Pope Francis during a news conference in Rome on Saturday. (Guglielmo Mangiapane/Reuters)
ROME — Pope Francis is expected to be discharged on Sunday from the Rome hospital where he spent five weeks battling the most severe health crisis of his papacy, Francis’s doctors said on Saturday.
The pope will return to his home at a Vatican City boardinghouse for what his doctors described as a “convalescence” of at least two months.
Francis, who was admitted to Rome’s Agostino Gemelli Polyclinic on Feb. 14 with a respiratory infection that was later diagnosed as double pneumonia, faced two life-threatening episodes during his hospitalization, doctors said. His condition has been stable for two weeks, doctors said, and the pope was eager to be released.
“The good news that the world has waited for has arrived. The pope will be released tomorrow,” Sergio Alfieri, a surgeon at Rome’s Agostino Gemelli Polyclinic and one of the pope’s attending physicians.
This is a developing story and will be updated.