The ‘Vatican III’: This is the Gemelli University Hospital where the Pope is admitted

Visible from one of the rooms of the structure, a statue of San Juan Paul II custody – as if it was from San Pedro. Agostino Gemelli University Hospitalone of the greatest in Rome and the person in charge of ensuring the health of the pontiffs of the Catholic Church for decades, turned into an extension of the Vatican. Since last Friday, it is Pope Francis who occupies one of the rooms of this health center to be the bilateral pneumonia of which he has been diagnosed and who has the faithful of the whole world in suspense.

After the figure of Karol Wojtila, now surrounded by dozens of candles to ask for Francisco’s health, a structure of 37 hectares opens, more than 5,000 workers and more than 1,600 beds than It deals with the health of the potatoes from the pontificate of John Paul II on the tenth of the hospital. It was on May 13, 1981 when the eyes of the entire world perched on this health center in northwest of Rome after the attack against the then Holy Father.

John Paul II arrived in ambulance after have been reached by the bullets fired by Ali Agca In the Plaza de San Pedro during a general audience when the ‘Papamóvil’, with the top discovered, moved between the crowd. As soon as the hospital doors are transferred and after having lost a lot of blood at the doors of the Vatican, he was taken to the operating room, where the surgeon Francesco Cruitti saved his life after a complicated intervention.

Over the years, Juan Paul II was admitted several times to the Gemelli, who ended up receiving the nickname of ‘Vatican III’, considering the third residence of the potatoes after San Pedro and Castel Gandolfo the pontiffs). There he spent a total of 153 days hospitalized in a kind of private apartment about 200 square meters In the tenth plant that has a chapel, living room and kitchen, among others, according to Italian media.

Unlike Benedict XVI, who was never treated at the Gemelli, Francisco has followed the steps of John Paul II and It has been a regular patient. In 2021 he remained there ten days after an operation for a diverticulitis that forced him to remove a part of the colon. In 2023 he was also hospitalized due to a polymicrobial infection of the respiratory tract, similar to the one he currently suffers. A couple of months later, he was intervened with an abdominal incisional hernia.

The hospital, which is linked to the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, has also treated other world personalities, such as The Nobel Peace Prize Mother Teresa de Calculathe theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking and the priest Georg Ratzinger, older brother of Pope Benedict XVI.

Dedicated to a medical priest

The hospital, projected by the architect Gaetano Minnucci in a land donated in 1934 by Pope Pius XI to the Giuseppe Toniolo Institute of Higher Studies, opened its doors in 1964 with 70 beds and owes its name to Agostino Gemelli, An Italian doctor and priest of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

This religious was the son of a marriage of Garibaldian ideas and was educated in atheism, according to María Sticco, one of her biographers. After finishing your medical studies, Gemelli began to approach faith and ended up taking habits In the order of smaller friars for his great love of San Francisco. He combined his priestly work with the study and ended up founding the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, currently linked to the hospital that bears his name.