In the Pope’s final days, doctors pleaded with him to rest. But Francis had a final mission

In the end, it was not the solemn corridors of a hospital ward that bore witness to Pope Francis’s final days, but the sun-drenched square of St Peter’s Basilica, draped in spring tulips and echoing with chants of “Viva il Papa”.

Doctors had pleaded with him to rest. The double pneumonia had nearly claimed him just weeks before. He was 88, frail, and barely breathing at times during a 38-day hospital stay so dire his physicians, in private, considered letting nature take its course.

Yet, Francis had a different kind of prognosis in mind — one not guided by medicine, but by a mission.

He would live until Easter. He would speak one last time to the world.

Holy Week, with its heavy symbolism of sacrifice and renewal, saw the Pontiff re-emerge from convalescence in what now seems an act of sheer spiritual defiance.

Earlier in the week, he had received a small group of children at the Apostolic Palace, surprising them with Easter sweets and simple words of affection.

“I can’t do what I used to,” he reportedly told them, “but I can still smile.”

From Maundy Thursday, when he insisted on visiting inmates at Rome’s Regina Coeli prison despite being too weak to perform the traditional foot-washing, to Holy Saturday, where he quietly prayed with children at the Vatican, every public appearance was a chapter in a final homily.

Though his body failed him, he was determined to keep to tradition in spirit. On Good Friday, the Pope broke with public appearances but maintained private devotion. Inside the Domus Santa Marta, where he resided, he held a moment of personal reflection and prayer for the Passion of Christ — a rite he had never missed.

On Easter Sunday, Francis took his place atop the loggia of St Peter’s, wrapped in white, thinned by illness but alert and resolute. He didn’t deliver the full Urbi et Orbi message — the effort was too great — but the words read aloud to the crowd gathered by an aide were his. A benediction to the faithful. A plea to the world.

“On this day, I would like all of us to hope anew,” the Pope had written. “To revive our trust in others… for all of us are children of God.”

It was a moment made all the more poignant as the Church prepared for the Jubilee Year of Hope in 2025 — a celebration of renewal that Francis was determined to see through to its threshold.

His final message, rich with calls for peace, mercy and compassion, now becomes a kind of prelude to that Jubilee – one he did not live to witness, but helped usher in with a message of enduring hope.

It was Easter distilled — not just in liturgy, but in living metaphor. A man who had nearly died weeks earlier now stood, weak but unyielding, to deliver a sermon about new beginnings. It was his final act. By the next morning, the Vatican confirmed, the pope had died peacefully, from a stroke and subsequent heart failure.

To some, it may appear stubbornness. To others, divine timing. But for Francis, it was likely neither. It was, in his view, his duty. The final delivery of a message he had carried since his first day in office: that the margins matter most, and love for the stranger is the test of true faith.

Even his last diplomatic encounter was freighted with quiet resistance. In a short Easter Sunday meeting with US Vice President J.D. Vance — a Catholic convert and right-hand man to Donald Trump — the two men exchanged pleasantries. But Francis’s Easter address, released just hours later, did not shy from a pointed reiteration of his condemnation of anti-immigrant policies.

“How much contempt is stirred up… towards migrants,” he wrote. “Yet we are all brothers and sisters.”

The juxtaposition was unmistakable. The Pontiff’s smile was warm yet his message firm.

Francis’s voice, while weakened physically, was perhaps never clearer. He named wars in Ukraine, Congo, Gaza, Myanmar and Yemen. He called for a ceasefire. He denounced rising antisemitism and decried indifference to suffering.

Then, in what was to be his last public moment, he boarded the open-top Popemobile, his wheelchair locked in place, and made one final loop through the faithful. Blessing children passed to him with trembling hands, waving to crowds chanting his name, Francis turned St Peter’s Square into a stage of farewell. The moment appeared intentional. Holy. Final.

Francis will be remembered for many things — a reformer, a Jesuit, a defender of the poor. But perhaps the most enduring image will be of a dying man who refused to retreat, who carried his message past the point of pain and into history.

In his last Easter, Francis did not preach resurrection. He embodied it.