In a 1956 letter to a friend, Flannery O’Connor, speaking of her adulthood battle with lupus, said, “I have never been anywhere but sick. In a sense sickness is a place more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it’s a place where there’s no company, where nobody can follow.”

In a sense, all of us on this side of heaven have never been anywhere but sick; if we do not suffer in body, we at least intimately know the spiritual sickness of sin. 

Tending to the sick of body, mind and spirit, and pointing them to the Divine Physician, has been a primary theme of Pope Francis’ pontificate. Like his namesake, St. Francis of Assisi, the Pope has called us to live out the corporal works of mercy.

It is particularly moving in light of how, each evening this week, people are gathering in St. Peter’s Square to pray for Pope Francis’ recovery as he remains in the hospital, where daily Holy Hours are also being held. 

Every year on Feb. 11, the memorial of Our Lady of Lourdes, the Church also remembers all who are sick. Since the first World Day of the Sick was celebrated in February 1992 by Pope St. John Paul II, it has been a papal tradition to write a message in commemoration of this day. Pope Francis’ recent messages have been especially edifying. 

The need for hope and consolation from the Body of Christ is why Pope Francis calls us to tend to the relationships of those who are unwell:

“Brothers and sisters, the first form of care needed in any illness is compassionate and loving closeness. To care for the sick thus means above all to care for their relationships, all of them: with God, with others — family members, friends, healthcare workers — with creation and with themselves” (2024 World Day of the Sick message).

The sick, as O’Connor suggests in her letter to a friend, experience isolation. In a sense, no one can truly share the experience of our sickness and suffering. An occupant of our body, sickness can also take hold in our spirit. This is powerfully illustrated in Psalm 88, “The Prayer of a Sick Person,” the only Psalm that does not end in hope. When sick, it can seem, as we read in Night Prayer on Fridays:

“Friend and neighbor you have taken away, / My one companion is darkness” (Psalm 88:19). 

Pope Francis has imaged this compassionate tending to the unwellness that has plagued our current day in a variety of ways. 

One resounding example was the 2020 Stations of the Cross at Padua Prison, in which the meditations were led by those serving prison sentences, parents of a murdered child, a corrections officer, and the child of one in prison, among others. Such light came from witnessing the intersection between reflections on personal Calvaries and Christ’s. Each voice meditated on the cross, how Christ met them in a space of fracture, grief and pain. As one in prison, meditating upon the First Station, said, “I know in my heart that the Innocent One, condemned like me, came to find me in prison to teach me about life.”

Pope Francis has also remained close to those who have suffered through conflict and war, seeking to bolster them with his prayers. To Ukraine, in a letter written in November 2022, he said, “With you, I weep for every child killed in this war, like Kira in Odessa, like Lisa in Vinnytsia, like hundreds of other children. In each of them, our very humanity has been deeply scarred. … I would like to return with you to Bethlehem, to the troubles the Holy Family had to face on that cold and dark night. Yet a light arrived: not from men but from God, not from earth but from heaven.” 

In October 2024, he said in a letter to Catholics in the Middle East:

“Just as a seed, apparently pressed down by the earth that covers it, is always able to find its way upwards, towards the light, in order to bear fruit and give life, do not let yourselves be engulfed by the darkness that surrounds you. Planted in your sacred lands, become sprouts of hope, because the light of faith leads you to testify to love amid words of hatred, to encounter amid growing confrontation, to unity amid increasing hostility.” 

To the ills of this world, Pope Francis calls us to be a Church that ministers to the body, mind and heart of our brothers and sisters. As he says in Fratelli Tutti, “Only a gaze transformed by charity can enable the dignity of others to be recognized” (187). It is turning toward the Lord, in seeing how he gazes upon us with profound love, that we can begin to truly see every person we meet as a someone who images Christ. 

Such accompaniment is key, as the Pope noted in his Feb. 23 Angelus text: “Thank you for this closeness, and for the prayers of comfort I have received from all over the world!”

Sickness, then, can be a place of encounter, a transformative part of our pilgrimage of hope. As the Pope noted in his 2025 World Day of the Sick message — released just days before he was hospitalized, though it was finished in January — “In times of illness, we sense our human frailty on the physical, psychological and spiritual levels. Yet we also experience the closeness and compassion of God, who, in Jesus, shared in our human suffering. God does not abandon us and often amazes us by granting us a strength that we never expected, and would never have found on our own. 

“Sickness, then, becomes an occasion for a transformative encounter, the discovery of a solid rock to which we can hold fast amid the tempests of life, an experience that, even at great cost, makes us all the stronger because it teaches us that we are not alone.”