Media Turn Doomsayers in Covering Pope’s Health : Journalism: Reports dwell on possible illnesses. Vatican says he is fine, but its history of secrecy leads to speculation.

Last September, when Pope John Paul II postponed a trip to the United States, Vatican officials said it was because he was not recovering quickly enough from hip replacement surgery required after a fall five months earlier. But media speculation on the “real” state of the Pope’s health, which had been building for months, intensified immediately. He was reported to be suffering from Parkinson’s disease, bone marrow cancer, colon cancer, a blood-borne virus and other potentially fatal diseases.

Newspapers and newsmagazines began updating their obituaries, and speculative stories on the Pope’s successor began cropping up.

Even when the Pope recovered sufficiently to travel to Asia in January, the emphasis of most coverage was on his health. A typical story, distributed by the London-based Reuters news agency while the Pope was in Australia, began: “A tired-looking Pope John Paul II . . .” and went on, in the next 11 paragraphs, to say he “seemed to be fatigued,” suffered from “apparent fatigue,” “looked tired” (twice) and was “lifted onto the back of the racetrack stage by a forklift truck, unable to walk up the 30-odd steps at the front.”

When the Pope arrived in Sri Lanka, the last stop on his Asian trip, the Washington Post described him as “showing fatigue . . . moving slowly and looking tired . . . exhausted . . . frail. . . .”

But as Greg Burke, who covered the trip for Time magazine, said in a recent interview, “It was 90 degrees . . . with 110% humidity (in Sri Lanka). . . . I walked out to the Mass on Sunday, and after 15 minutes my shirt was drenched and I walked back to the hotel room and watched it on TV . . . and I’m about 60 years younger” than the Pope.

Not quite. But the Pope did complete the grueling, 11-day trip to four countries in pretty good shape for a 74-year-old man who had undergone three operations in 31 months.

As William Montalbano, the Los Angeles Times correspondent in Rome, wrote from Sri Lanka:

“He limped and he sometimes winced, he suffered from heat and jet lag, but he seldom faltered. Across 10 time zones and more than 20,000 miles, he offered tacit rejoinder to all who have been musing over the twilight of a papacy.”

Many reporters who accompanied the Pope to Asia returned home seemingly in worse shape than he, fighting jet lag, fatigue and an unknown virus that had several--including Montalbano--feeling ill for days.

The Pope, once rested, resumed his rigorous daily routine, which Tad Szulc, in his new book “Pope John Paul II: The Biography,” describes as beginning at 5 every morning with “two hours of prayer and meditation in his private chapel” and as seldom ending before midnight.

Since John Paul returned from Asia, the Vatican has announced several trips abroad, to the Czech republic, Slovakia, Belgium and his native Poland this summer and to Africa in the fall. In March, the Vatican also announced that John Paul had rescheduled his visit to the United States and would begin the four-day stay at the United Nations for its 50th anniversary celebration Oct. 5 before going to Newark, N.J., Brooklyn, N.Y., and Baltimore.

That is an ambitious itinerary for someone whom many in the media had placed near death a few months ago. Indeed, the Pope, who will be 75 in May, says he intends to live at least until 2000 so he can lead the church into the third millennium.

So why has there been--why does there continue to be--so much speculation that he is much closer to death than the Vatican says?

The most obvious explanation is that the Pope is an old man who has lived a tough life; for all anyone outside his inner circle knows, he might well be very sick. His mother died when he was a week shy of his 9th birthday, his father when he was 21. Not long after, on his way back from a quarry outside Krakow, where he worked, the young man was run over by a German army truck and lay unconscious for hours. In 1981, John Paul survived an assassin’s bullet and a subsequent infection. He was operated on again in 1992 for a colon tumor, in 1993 after he dislocated his shoulder in a fall, and in 1994 after breaking his leg in another fall.

Although it is the hip replacement that has continued to plague him, the tumor surgery raised more journalistic eyebrows, in the Vatican and elsewhere. Doctors said it was benign, but traditionally, the Vatican has not been forthcoming with the media about the Pope’s health or much of anything else; when his recovery from the hip replacement seemed to lag, many journalists wondered if they had been told the truth about the earlier operation.

Did the Pope have cancer? Why should it take him so long to recover from a routine hip replacement?

After all, the Pope had been physically vigorous, an ardent skier, swimmer, hiker and mountain climber. Suddenly--in late August and early September--he looked old and tired. He was seen wincing in pain. His left hand trembled. He needed a cane--or someone’s support--to walk just a few steps. He canceled trips.

Vatican officials insisted that the trembling hand resulted from nerve damage during the assassination attempt. Apart from age, they said, there was nothing wrong that time wouldn’t cure.

Cardinal Pio Laghi, prefect of the Congregation for Catholic Education, said in a recent interview that the Pope was recovering slowly from the hip replacement in part because he insisted on keeping a full schedule and could not do all the physical therapy his doctors would have wanted.

But, historically, the Vatican’s position has been that “a Pope is not officially sick until he’s dead,” says Father Vincent O’Keefe, religious superior of the Jesuit community at America House in New York.

That position, combined with the Pope’s sudden decline--and the contemporary media’s voracious appetite for any hint of subterfuge or suppression involving public figures--made speculation on his health seem greater than for any of his predecessors, at least in retrospect and when looked at in light of his improvement.

“Part of the problem, I think, is the lack of credibility of that (Vatican press) office,” O’Keefe says, “especially on matters touching the Pope’s health. . . . That’s why so much speculation is still going on. You simply cannot put full trust in what they (in the Vatican press office) report when it concerns the Pope’s health.”

Journalistic suspicion is so strong on this score that when John Paul II’s immediate predecessor, John Paul I, died a month after being elected in 1978, some speculated that he had been murdered--a theory widely discredited, both then and now.

The Vatican’s media relations have improved significantly since Joaquin Navarro-Valls, a former Spanish newspaper reporter, took charge of the Vatican press office in 1984. But Navarro has many centuries of distrust to overcome and he has not been able to dispel all the suspicions, at least in part because, his professionalization of Vatican media relations notwithstanding, he has alienated some in the press corps by tightly controlling the flow of information.

Not only did Navarro put electronic controls on the door that separates him and his staff of 15 from reporters and the public, but he had the pressroom remodeled. He installed 14 locked cubicles along both walls for regulars and 14-inch-high, opaque, plexiglass partitions on the long, narrow table that other reporters share in the room’s center.

The partitions divide the table into 20 small work spaces, turning what was a “common” table into something resembling visiting quarters in a prison.

These moves created new “psychological” barriers between the media and the Vatican and made the pressroom less convivial, says David Willey, the BBC correspondent in Rome and author of “God’s Politician: Pope John Paul II, the Catholic Church and the New World Order.”

But Navarro says the locked cubicles provide reporters with privacy--and security for their computers and telephones. The rest of the remodeling was designed to give his office more control over the flow of Vatican news.

When the pressroom had “an open door to the street,” Navarro says, “professional journalists, amateurs, diplomats . . . priests, nuns (came in and were) . . . talking to each other continuously.” The result, he says, was “tremendous confusion,” coverage that was “blah-blah-blah-blah . . . unconfirmed, not-for-unattribution.”

“Now,” he says, “almost everything is on the record.”

Navarro tends to be circumspect, though, so on the record or not, journalists did not automatically accept his assurances that the Pope had neither cancer nor any other life-threatening disease, even though Navarro is himself a doctor.

“They could release some medical records to us,” says David Crumm, religion writer for the Detroit Free Press. “They could end the speculation, but they choose not to. . . . They’re working for an institution that has been famous for centuries for its secret intrigues, and they fault us for not taking what they say at face value. I think that’s a little disingenuous.”

If news accounts of the Pope’s health have been exaggerated, that is “in part because the Vatican has not been straightforward,” says Victor Simpson, the Associated Press news editor in Rome. He recalls a press briefing in August when Navarro said the Pope had been walking “several kilometers a day in the mountains,” even though reporters had seen (and written) that he had “clutched his stomach” while coming down from a Mass in the Italian Alps the day before and seemed to be greatly weakened.

But Vatican credibility and papal age and infirmity have not been the only factors responsible for stories speculating on the Pope’s demise.

John Paul has been Pope for 16 years, and since the fall of communism in 1989, he has hammered repeatedly at the same themes--the dignity of human life; the need for peace; social justice and a redistribution of wealth; opposition to abortion and the ordination of women as priests.

“He’s a salesman with no new products,” as Montalbano of the Los Angeles Times puts it, and journalists are always looking for new products--a new story, a new angle, a new player. “Pope May Have Cancer. Speculation on Successor Begins” provides all three.

When John Paul appointed 30 cardinals last fall, the speculation took on greater intensity. Those appointments meant that he had chosen 100 of the 120 men who will elect his successor, thus “ensuring that the church’s future is in the hands of like-minded men committed to the conservative fundamentals of his papacy,” as the Washington Post put it.

But Karol Wotjyla’s own surprise election as Pope in 1978 makes it clear that any speculation on succession is “fruitless,” says Szulc.

Many supporters of John Paul II believe that the media’s premature deathwatch was not just a bored hunt for novelty or political machinations. They think it sometimes was wishful thinking.

“They want to get rid of him; they want him to die,” says Cardinal Edward Cassidy, president of the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of Christian Unity.

Most journalists vigorously deny this. The Pope looked very bad, they say, and it was appropriate--obligatory--to point that out.

“The most common refrain around here is, ‘My God, he’s gotten old,’ ” says Philip Pullella, a reporter in the Rome bureau of Reuters.

When any world leader seems to have health problems, it’s big news, and Archbishop John Foley, president of the Pontifical Council on Social Communications, says the media would probably be similarly preoccupied if President Clinton had “a hangnail.”

But a few journalists--and non-journalists--agree with Cassidy.

Willey of the BBC, who has been critical of John Paul and Navarro, attributes the frenzy over the Pope’s health, in part, to “wishful thinking” by some in the media.

Although reporters’ understandable skepticism about the Vatican press office also contributed to the flurry of “Pope Dying” stories, Willey says he believes the Vatican has been “straight” this time about the Pope’s health, and he attributes that in large measure to Navarro.

Father Richard John Neuhaus, president of the New York-based Institute on Religion and Public Life, says he had dinner with the Pope in October, at the height of the health scare rumors, and had never seen him “more vibrant . . . more alive . . . more engaged.”

Neuhaus says the “cognitive dissonance” between what he saw and heard of John Paul and the “deathwatch” journalism he was reading “would have been painful” had it not been so laughable.

About the same time, Cardinal John O’Connor of New York says that he sat “immediately beside the Pope for an entire month” during a Vatican synod on religious life. “I escorted him . . . to and from his car twice a day, chatted with him regularly . . . had meals with him,” and while John Paul “suffered excruciatingly” from pain in his hip and was “terribly frustrated” that he needed a cane to walk, O’Connor says, “his vigor was almost unbelievable.”

Nevertheless, O’Connor says, the world press accounts he was reading, particularly from the United States, “had the Pope buried . . . his body moldering in the grave.”

O’Connor and Neuhaus, like Cassidy, are longtime supporters of John Paul, so one might be tempted to dismiss their insistence on his robust health as their own brand of “wishful thinking.”

But judging from the Pope’s daily schedule and travel plans, he does seem to have rebounded dramatically.

“Easter Week ceremonies, including a 70-minute walk around the Colosseum in cold rain Friday night, underlined that the Pope is a lot healthier than he seemed late last year,” Montalbano wrote Monday in the Los Angeles Times.

The Pope, Montalbano wrote, demonstrated both “the frailty that is a legacy of age and a broken leg--and the stamina that is a hallmark of his life and his reign.”

When John Paul made his traditional Good Friday procession around the 2,000-year-old Colosseum, commemorating Christ’s sufferings before his crucifixion, he carried the wooden cross on only three of the 14 Stations of the Cross. John Paul had carried the cross on all 14 stations in previous years, but Navarro said six others--including a Russian Orthodox priest from Moscow, a Protestant nun and a teen-age girl--carried it this year to emphasize the ceremony’s ecumenical nature.

He said this change should not be interpreted as a sign of new health problems for the Pope. Reuters pointed out, however, that “carrying the cross for any length of time over the uneven ground at the ancient site would clearly have posed problems,” and the Pope did limp heavily Friday, as he often does these days. After relinquishing the cross, he used a cane and was helped down stairs, both relatively common occurrences now and both, the Vatican says, attributable solely to his slow recovery from the hip replacement.

Papal supporters note that the most ominous early story on the Pope’s health was written by Peter Hebblethwaite, a prominent Vaticanologist and frequent papal critic, who covered the Vatican for the National Catholic Reporter and for Britain’s weekly Catholic newspaper the Tablet. Last fall, he wrote that a medical team treating the Pope had concluded that he probably would live only three or four more years.

Hebblethwaite, who himself died a few months later, wrote several books on the Catholic Church, including massive biographies of John XXIII and Paul VI, and many regarded him as perhaps the world’s leading (and most influential) journalistic authority on the Vatican.

Supporters of John Paul, however, regarded Hebblethwaite as “probably the biggest single obstacle in the English-speaking world to serious reporting on the Pope,” says George Weigel, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

Regardless of what one thought of Hebblethwaite, it is clear from what he and others wrote--and from dozens of interviews in Rome and the U.S. this year--that the journalists and journalistic sources who have tended to be the most critical of the Pope have been, in general, the most likely to depict him as seriously ill.

“There’s definitely no doubt we’re in the twilight of this papacy,” Frances Kissling, head of Catholics for Free Choice and an outspoken critic of papal policies on contraception, abortion and the ordination of women, told USA Today in September. Reporters, she says, had been interviewing her “because they were preparing his obituary.”

But Simpson of the AP says that even though his editors have asked him to update the Pope’s obituary, as if “he’s gonna die any minute,” Simpson thinks “he’s gonna make it to 2000.”

“I think a person’s will is very important in keeping him going,” Simpson says, “and I think he has a great desire to do it. He’ll push himself to the limits to do it.”

Jacci Cenacveira of The Times’ editorial library assisted with the research for this series.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

About This Series

The Times today presents the last in a four-part series examining how the media cover the Pope.

* Sunday: A propensity for sensationalism, conflict and oversimplification and an ignorance of (and often hostility toward) religion in general and Catholicism in particular have skewed media coverage of the 16-year papacy of John Paul II.

* Monday: The Pope’s spin doctor is a former foreign correspondent and a psychiatrist who has made things much easier for reporters. But many say the Vatican still is as closed and secretive as the Cold War Kremlin, and journalists assigned there cannot interview the Pope himself.

* Tuesday: Religion gets short shrift in the mainstream U.S. media, but Catholicism gets a disproportionate share of that small pie, in part because it is great theater and in part because it has a single, controversial leader who knows how to use (and manipulate) the media.

* Today: Many in the media thought the Pope was dying when he began to look frail and sickly last year. Now he has resumed his global travels, determined to live at least until 2000. Why were the media so quick to assume the worst?

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Speculating on the Pope’s Health

When the Pope appeared to grow suddenly old and frail last year, the media began speculating on the death--and his successor--despite the Vatican’s assurance that he was just recovering slowly from hip replacement surgery after a fall.