A weak Pope Francis is wielding power and rewriting the narrative of how popes exercise authority

During his first foreign trip in 2013, Pope Francis made headlines when he carried his own black leather briefcase as he boarded the Alitalia charter bound for Brazil, since popes never carry bags and until the 1970s were themselves carried on thrones.

Asked what was in the bag, Francis joked that it wasn’t the nuclear codes. But he seemed baffled that something as normal as an airplane passenger carrying a briefcase could create such a fuss.

“I have always taken a bag with me when travelling – it’s normal,” he told his first news conference as pope. “We must get used to being normal. The normality of life.”

Over 12 years, Francis has sought to impose a kind of normality on the papacy with his informal style and disdain for pomp, while ensuring that he still wields the awesome power held by Christ’s vicar on Earth and Europe’s last absolute monarch.

The way Francis has managed his five-week hospitalization for pneumonia has followed that same playbook: He has allowed the public to follow the very normal ups and downs of an 88-year-old man battling a complex lung infection through spare but regular medical bulletins, while also continuing to run the 1.3-billion strong Catholic Church remotely.

Francis has stayed in control, remotely

In between respiratory crises, prayer and physiotherapy, Francis has appointed over a dozen bishops, approved a handful of new saints, authorized a three-year extension of his signature reform process and sent off messages public and private. Vatican cardinals have stood in for him at events requiring his presence.

That’s not as easy a balancing act as it sounds, since there are few positions of power that are both as absolute as the papacy and, during times of illness, as seemingly fragile: According to the church’s canon law, the pope possesses “supreme, full, immediate, and universal ordinary power in the church.” He answers to no one but God, and there is no appeal of his decisions.