While some have wondered whether his ailing health might be driving his actions, Francis, who from the beginning said he didn’t expect to live long in the job, has often moved with urgency.
There is a sense among some Vatican analysts and conservatives that Francis, who is suffering from a lung inflammation that forced him to pass off his readings at the event and to cancel an important trip to Dubai this weekend, is increasingly focusing his depleted energies on settling scores and cleaning house.
In the last month, he has turned his focus on two of his most vocal and committed conservative critics in the United States, and in the year since the death of his conservative predecessor, Benedict XVI, he has exiled a previously protected chief antagonist and moved against others who have accused him of destroying the church.
While some have wondered whether his ailing health might be driving his actions, Francis, who from the beginning said he didn’t expect to live long in the job, has often moved with urgency. And when it comes to personnel moves, analysts said, it has always been thus.
“He has always acted like this,” said Sandro Magister, a veteran Vatican observer at L’Espresso magazine, who cited cases of bishops that Francis had iced out for publicly divulging private conversations or for making him look bad or causing scandal, whether or not they were actually to blame.
But Mr. Magister said the death of Benedict XVI last December was the real catalyst for an even more intensive period of “frenetic activism” against his foes, with the former pope no longer a presence in the Vatican gardens.
While conservatives have long complained that the publicly cuddly pontiff has actually acted as a ruthless and impetuous autocrat, supporters of Francis, who will turn 87 next month and is increasingly slowed by the use of a cane and a wheelchair, say that he has exercised patience far beyond that of his conservative predecessors.
But that patience, people close to him say, has limits. And after years of allowing criticism in the interest of allowing good-faith debates, Francis has come to the conclusion that some of the invective is simply politically and ideologically driven.
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