Pope Francis is still at the Gemelli Hospital in Rome, slightly better but still in a critical state.
Some, or many, and not just within the Catholic Church, seem to have given up on him and are speculating on the imminent Conclave.
It is one of those almighty coincidences that right on cue there is the film Conclave, with a masterful act by Ralph Fiennes that is breaking box office records and winning awards.
The scenes from the Sistine Chapel and the arcane rituals associated with the choice of a new Pope ensure worldwide fascination about the power play behind closed doors.
I do not want to spoil things, but the absolutely incredible end of the film comes as a huge surprise.
Here in Malta, however, all this is relegated to the side by a section of the Maltese media that is speculating that Cardinal Mario Grech is a frontrunner.
It doesn’t take much to identify the ‘Pope-Whisperer’ behind this wave of speculation, forgetting the tried and tested Vatican lore that “he who enters Conclave a Pope comes out a Cardinal.”
The wave of credulity first tainted MaltaToday forgetting this was the same news organisation that years ago speculated that papal nuncio Joe Spiteri was about to follow Archbishop Paul Cremona as Archbishop of Malta only to learn a few days later that the new Archbishop was to be Charles Scicluna.
Now, the Pope-Whisperer has struck at The Times of Malta on the strength of a couple of Vatican media hacks.
In reality, Cardinal Grech will most probably not be the one.
The book and the film Conclave give a fair appreciation of the forces that would be at play in any Conclave held in the near future – the conservatives in the Church that have been marginalised by Pope Francis and the left-leaning Church of the Poor such as the Italian Zuppi of Bologna.
There is a huge swell of anger against Pope Francis on issues such as communion to divorcees, women deacons, and so on, spurred by the right-wing English language press that is daily becoming angrier at the current Pope.
Where does Grech feature in all this? He is definitely a creature of Francis picked from the diocese of Gozo and promoted to the Secretariat of the Synod. And even the Synod has its deniers.
The outcome of any electoral process, such as a Conclave, depends on the interplay of many factors and is extremely uncertain.
What is rather surprising (or not surprising at all) is the credulity of the Maltese media, which they then pass on to their readers and viewers. But this is no news at all. It happens all the time and all over the place.
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Dreaming of a Maltese-born Pope is one thing, but agreeing in choosing a leader of the Catholic Church is certainly not a very light task on the Cardinal electors.
Some of us who have followed Papal elections at least since 1958, following the demise of Pius XII when Cardinal Angelo Roncalli was elected and selected the name of John XXIII for a very specific historical reason, perhaps too complicated to explain in a short summary.
We all know the immense contribution and upheaval that Pope Roncalli contributed to the Church itself, to Christianity and to the whole world – based on his long experience as special envoy in Eastern Europe and Turkey and, especially as Nuncio to post-war France.
None of the elected Cardinals were very much known among the millions of Catholic worldwide, prior to being chosen by his colleagues – except, perhaps and to a very limited extent, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini (Paul VI) who may be described as the first pilgrim Pope in the Church’s modern history.
Yet, when the details of their past activities and their contributions in the various fields where they exercised their missions became increasingly known, the whole world admired them and loved them.
Opponents, adversaries and critics were certainly not lacking, this notwithstanding.
Dreaming doth not a Pope make, but serious evaluation of the Catholic Church’s requirements in specific times and world situations certainly do – and they will, once again, in choosing a new Successor to Peter!