Pope suffering with a cold and will skip outdoor Sunday prayer before busy week

The Vatican cited the cold temperatures outside and the pope’s strenuous week ahead, after a wheezing and congested-sounding Francis delivered his annual Christmas greeting to Vatican bureaucrats earlier on Saturday.

Francis, who turned 88 this past week, is due to inaugurate his big Holy Year on Tuesday and preside over Christmas Eve and Christmas Day celebrations in St Peter’s Basilica. On Thursday, he is scheduled to travel to Rome’s main prison to inaugurate the Jubilee there.

Francis has long suffered bouts of bronchitis, especially in winter. In 2023, he ended up at the hospital to receive intravenous antibiotics. He had part of one lung removed as a young man and frequently seems out of breath, especially after walking or exerting himself.

The pope used his address on Saturday to admonish the backstabbing and gossiping among his closest collaborators and urge them instead to speak well of one another.

“A church community lives in joyful and fraternal harmony to the extent that its members walk in the life of humility, renouncing evil thinking and speaking ill of others,” Francis said. “Gossip is an evil that destroys social life, sickens people’s hearts and leads to nothing. The people say it very well: Gossip is zero.”

“Beware of this,” he added.

By now Francis’s annual Christmas address to the priests, bishops and cardinals who work in the Vatican Curia has become a lesson in humility – and humiliation – as Francis offers a public dressing down of some of the sins in the workplace at the headquarters of the Catholic Church.

In the most biting edition, in 2014, Francis listed the “15 ailments of the Curia”, in which he accused the prelates of using their Vatican careers to grab power and wealth. He accused them of living “hypocritical” double lives and forgetting – due to “spiritual Alzheimer’s” – that they are supposed to be joyful men of God.

In 2022, Francis warned them that the devil lurks among them, saying it is an “elegant demon” that works in people who have a rigid, holier-than-thou way of living the Catholic faith.

This year, Francis revisited a theme he has often warned about: gossiping and speaking ill of people behind their backs. It was a reference to the sometimes toxic atmosphere in closed environments such as the Vatican or workplaces where office gossip and criticism circulate but are rarely aired in public.

Francis has long welcomed frank and open debates and has even welcomed criticism of his own work. But he has urged critics to tell it to his face, and not behind his back.

Francis opened his address on Saturday with a reminder of the devastation of the war in Gaza, where he said even his patriarch had been unable to enter due to Israeli bombing.

“Yesterday children have been bombed. This is cruelty, this is not war,” he said.