A recovering Pope Francis visits Rome prison to keep annual Holy Week appointment
Francis met for nearly a half-hour with some 70 inmates at the Regina Coeli prison in Rome's Trastevere neighborhood. It's a prison Francis has visited before to perform the annual Holy Thursday ritual of washing the feet of 12 people to re-enact Christ's gesture of humble service of washing the feet of 12 apostles before his crucifixion.
Francis told the inmates he couldn't do it this year, given his health, but wanted to nevertheless be with them and 'do what Jesus did on Holy Thursday.'
The fact that the 88-year-old pope kept the appointment, when he is under doctors' orders to take it easy and avoid crowds, was a clear sign of the importance he places on prison ministry and the need for priests to serve those most on the margins. That is all the more true during the 2025 Holy Year, which both opened and will close with special papal events for prison inmates.
'Every time I enter one of these places, I ask myself: 'Why them and not me?'' Francis told reporters outside the prison in his first off-the-cuff comments since he got sick.
Francis is expected to make at least some other Easter-time appearances over the coming days, even as cardinals will preside in his place during Holy Week's busy events. He made a surprise cameo at the end of Palm Sunday Mass last weekend and in recent days has made some unannounced visits — including one in which he wasn't dressed in his papal white cassock — to pray in St. Peter's Basilica and St. Mary Major basilica across town.
By all indications he is continuing to improve after his five-week hospital stay and is slowly resuming some of his normal activities. In recent outings, including on Thursday, he has been seen without the nasal tubes that provide supplemental oxygen and Vatican officials say he is increasingly less reliant on the therapy.
Asked Thursday how he was doing and marking this year's Easter season, Francis said in a weak voice: 'I am living it as I can.'
On Wednesday, Francis held his first formal group audience since returning to the Vatican on March 23, meeting with the medical staff of the Gemelli hospital who cared for him during his 38-day stay. Gathered in a Vatican audience hall, Francis thanked the 70-plus doctors, nurses and administrators and asked them for their continued prayers.
'Thank you for everything you did,' Francis said, his voice still labored but seemingly stronger as he continues respiratory and physical therapy.
Francis has delegated the demanding Holy Week liturgical celebrations to hand-picked cardinals, but the Vatican says the pope himself composed the meditations that will be read aloud by others during the Via Crucis (Way of the Cross) procession on Friday night at Rome's Colosseum.
Easter Sunday Mass has been assigned to the retired administrator of St. Peter's, Cardinal Angelo Comastri.
It remains to be seen how Francis will handle Easter Sunday's traditional 'Urbi et Orbi' (Latin for 'to the city and the world') speech and blessing after Mass. Normally the pope delivers a sometimes lengthy discourse on the state of the world from the loggia of St. Peter's, and then imparts a special blessing to the faithful in the piazza below. In theory someone else could read the speech while Francis could impart the blessing.
Francis was admitted to Gemelli on Feb. 14 with bronchitis that quickly developed into a life-threatening case of double pneumonia. Upon his release March 23, doctors prescribed two months of convalescence at the Vatican with daily respiratory and physical therapy to improve his breathing and vocal function. With time, they have predicted he will be able to resume his normal activities.
Winfield writes for the Associated Press.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Time Magazine
4 days ago
- Time Magazine
Function Health CEO Jonathan Swerdlin Is Trying to Change the Way We Manage Our Wellbeing
When Jonathan Swerdlin tells you he pours his blood, sweat, and tears into his work, he means it more literally than most company leaders. Swerdlin is the CEO and co-founder of Function Health, a fast-growing personalized health testing platform that launched in 2023. I, too, have given the company dozens of vials of my blood: When I found out about Function last year, I hadn't been to the doctor in about a decade (a shameful confession for a health journalist). I was tired of what felt like a broken health-care system, but I knew I needed a check-up, so I signed up for Function, which costs $499 per year and includes two rounds of blood testing. First, you get an initial assessment with 160 lab tests, and then three to six months later, a follow-up including 60-plus retests to see how your numbers are changing. While no treatment regimen is provided based on results, clients receive personalized written insights from Function's team of clinicians. 'We, previous to this, knew less about our bodies than we knew about our cars. And Function has changed that,' Swerdlin says. 'Nobody can say in 2025 that they have no way to understand what's happening inside their body. By taking control today, you're taking control of the future. Data over time—and it's so important that it's done over time—can help ensure you're not missing anything that could materially impact your life.' Function—which is backed by big-name investors like Matt Damon, Zac Efron, Pedro Pascal, and Jay Shetty—now has hundreds of thousands of paying members. It's at the forefront of a growing trend of companies that aim to provide personalized insights to people tired of the traditional health care system. The idea is that, instead of waiting around for a doctor to figure out something is acutely wrong with you, you find out early enough to prevent it from becoming a bull-blown medical crisis. TIME spoke to Swerdlin in May about how Function, one of the TIME100 Most Influential Companies of 2025, is expanding and why the health care industry is so overdue for innovation. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. What inspired you to start Function Health, and what keeps you motivated to run this company every day? I had health issues when I was young, so I learned very early about the shortcomings of what health care can actually deliver. Fast forward, and my father beat prostate cancer, so I witnessed the power of medicine. I was caught between understanding the shortcomings of health care and the administration of it, and yet being in incredible admiration of the power of medicine. That sparked my own interest in taking control of my health, and I spent years and tens of thousands of dollars cobbling together what is mostly an analog version of what Function delivers today. It became clear to me that it wasn't a way to hack the system—it was actually the future of the way that people manage their lifelong health. It gave me so much agency and so much power that I felt like, I wish everybody could have this. I wish my whole family could have this; I wish my friends could have this, because I care about their life, and I want them to be able to benefit from this. Nobody knows what's happening inside their body, yet the objective should be to need less health care and to have more life. What do you think are the biggest challenges and shortcomings right now in the traditional health care system? Health care is incomplete. What we expect to get from health care, it is unable to meet. Health care is not about helping you manage your lifelong health—it's about solving problems. We've been missing any kind of platform or system that can help people manage their lifelong health outside of acute issues. And so what we need is a way to be on top of our heart, our liver, our kidneys, our thyroid, our hormones, and to always know what's going on and what we can be doing, outside of pharmaceutical interventions, to be healthier. What is a day in your life as CEO of Function Health like? I have one focus, which is to do every single thing in my power to make sure our members can live 100 healthy years. That's my job every day, so what do I actually tangibly do? I spend my mornings, first, taking care of my health: I exercise, I eat well, I hydrate, I sleep, I do those things that one needs to do. Once I've taken care of my health, I'll typically spend a lot of time understanding what's new in the landscape, what kind of research has been coming out, and what's the latest science. I have to keep on top of that every day. I also work with the team across all facets of the business, from how we tell our story, to where we are in engineering—as well as working diligently on expansion of the product. Speaking of staying on top of the science: Do you have a favorite way to do that? Well, I have a lot of help. I have a team that helps me do that; they surface and curate things that are coming up that are important in science and technology. But I also go digging around journals myself, and I work on keeping up with AI—which is moving at a breakneck pace. It's almost a job unto itself. You've previously remarked how cool it is that people finally care about health as a space in which to build a revolution. Has health care been pretty stagnant until now? Health care has largely seen incremental changes in mostly institutional systems, and this generation is seeing exponential change. The greatest problem that we have is that 40% of premature deaths are preventable. All the suffering that's attached to that—you can't quantify it. People are suffering. It is the greatest problem that we can address. It's a tangible problem, it's solvable, it's deeply impactful, and it sits inside of a tremendous market. There's $7 trillion spent across health and wellness. It's always been a bespoke and artisanal service, and it's moving from that to an engineered technology product model—which makes the ability to be healthy radically deflationary, and radically more accessible. What's the greatest challenge of running a company like Function Health? The biggest challenge is that we're racing against time to make sure that any person in the world gets access to this, and that means scaling up things that have previously not been scaled up. Function recently acquired Ezra and introduced a $499 full-body MRI scan. Why are you excited about this, and what will it bring to the company? Having a 360-degree perspective of your body has been difficult and very expensive. It takes a lot of time, traditionally, and it's hard to find. With this acquisition, we're introducing an FDA-cleared scan that AI brings from 60 minutes down to 22 minutes, and from $1,500 down to $499. By making it this affordable, this accessible, and this convenient and fast, we're able to make [it] a thing that people do annually—rather than something available to only a select few. People who get labs and scans done annually have, for the first time, a full 360-degree baseline of what's happening inside their body so they can fully understand how it's changing over time. You need to be able to detect changes, because changes are the best indicator of when something is going wrong. You've also partnered with companies like Equinox, Thrive Global, and GRAIL. What makes a potential partner a good fit? Our partners are committed to helping people achieve their best health. Equinox, for example, is clearly committed to making sure people are being healthy, because the whole purpose of their business is to get people to exercise and live a healthy lifestyle. So it's a natural mission alignment. The No. 1 thing is mission alignment, and then, does it actually make sense from a scale perspective? We think in the millions and billions. This is an 8 billion-person problem we're solving. Can you talk more about the way you prioritize accessibility–especially when good health care is out of reach for so many people? I'm so passionate about this. Function is $1.37 per day. With our partnership with Quest Diagnostics, we're available in over 2,200 locations around the country. It's also very convenient. The actual time it takes for a blood draw and urine collection is 3 to 5 minutes. It is the smallest investment of time, and $1.37 per day, to be on top of your health. We have people using Function in every state, including places like Mississippi and Alabama, where traditionally they weren't really adopters and are known for having medical deserts. We're creating health in what were previously medical deserts. I get the sense that running Function feels more like a calling to you than work. Is that right? Our life expectancy has flatlined. We are not getting healthier as a country. We can solve those problems—but upstream, we're not actually getting to the root of the issue. I wake up in the morning with the clear directive to help people not suffer or die of preventable death, and that's what drives me. That's what gets me to work. Running any company is hard. I can't imagine not fully, 100% believing in what you're doing, and caring about it with every fiber of your being. If you're going to be an entrepreneur, you're going to build something in the world, make sure it's actually solving a problem you can care about for the rest of your life. And this is my life's work.
Chicago Tribune
5 days ago
- Chicago Tribune
Potempa: Blessed with a 96-year-old father on the mend from heart surgery
In an April 11, 2007 newspaper column that is included in my 'Further From the Farm' cookbook published in 2010, I detailed my dad's experience with open-heart surgery and thanked readers for their e-mails, cards, and voicemails I received wishing him well. My father came through bypass surgery after spending six hours in the operating room at the University of Chicago Hospital. He was attended by heart-care specialists, including his surgeon Dr. Valluvan Jeevanandam, who were able to repair his leaking heart valve rather than having to replace it. My mom and siblings visited him in the intensive care unit every day, and he had the constant care of a private nurse at his side, which led us to be hopeful and confident he would continue to improve. That column ended with a reader recipe for Greek roast lamb, since that was the menu choice Dad wanted for Easter family dinner, which happened to be the day before his surgery. Last week, my 96-year-old dad Chester found himself back at the University of Chicago Hospital 18 years later at the advice of his cardiologist in Valparaiso, Dr. Maya Kommineni, and his general physician, Dr. Hector Marchand Jr. In recent months, tests showed my dad's heart was in need of a valve replacement. This time it was the associates of Dr. Jeevanandam, such as Dr. Atman Shah and Dr. Takeyoshi Ota who responsible for the much less invasive procedure of nearly three hours accessing the heart and arteries through the groin rather than breaking the rib cage. Dad spent three days in the intensive care unit before being moved to regular floor unit room and then sprung this weekend for some helpful rehab. The Aug. 17 Sunday date of this weekend is my mom Peggy's 94th birthday, and her best gift this year is that Dad's surgery went well and he's on the road to recovery. Last Sunday's dinner on Aug. 10 was my dad's last full family meal before we transported him to Chicago. His menu wish this time was far simpler than the roast lamb with rosemary and mint jelly. He asked for a hearty farm summer menu of Sloppy Joes on sesame seed buns, with smoked provolone cheese slices, sweet bread and butter pickle chips, mustard potato salad and fresh peaches and cream variety boiled sweet corn with a cold dessert finale of ice cream cones. Faithful friend and reader Diane Traher of Dyer makes the most delicious Sloppy Joes, a near tie with the scrumptious recipe from our late neighbor farm wife Joann Scamerhorn, which I printed in this column in 2016. Diane's recipe dates back to 1952 and comes from a small treasured hardcover cookbook titled 'The Anniversary Slovak-American Cook Book,' described as 'a commemoration of the 60th Anniversary of the first Catholic Slavic Ladies Association,' which was launched in 1892 in Cleveland, Ohio. 1 pound ground beef 1 large chopped onion 1 chopped green pepper 2 tablespoons sugar 1 tablespoon mustard 1 tablespoon vinegar 1 teaspoon salt 1 cup ketchup Directions: 1. Brown meat in a tablespoon of hot fat until it is crumbly but not hard. 2. Combine and add remaining ingredients. 3. Cover and simmer gently for 30 minutes. 4. Serve on toasted buns.
Time Magazine
12-08-2025
- Time Magazine
5 ChatGPT Prompts to Help You Live a Healthier Lifestyle
This article is published by a partner of TIME. In an age when smart technology touches every corner of our lives, it's no surprise that artificial intelligence is now playing a role in helping us stay healthy. Whether you're struggling with persistent fatigue, trying to manage high blood pressure, or simply looking to gain or lose a few pounds, ChatGPT can be a helpful brainstorming tool—generating suggestions that you can take to your doctor or other licensed professionals. But let's be very clear: ChatGPT should never be used to make actual health decisions. It is not a medical device, it is not trained to diagnose or treat, and it is not a replacement for your physician, dietitian, or licensed therapist. Instead, use it to gather information, clarify goals, and generate ideas you can review and personalize with your healthcare provider. With that purpose in mind, here are five useful prompts that can support a healthier lifestyle when paired with expert guidance. We wrote this article with research assistance and insights from AI. ChatGPT Prompts to Help You Improve Your Health Why It Works: Healthy eating is essential to managing many health conditions. Whether you're trying to gain weight, lower your cholesterol, or balance blood sugar, a smart meal plan can provide structure. ChatGPT can suggest meal ideas based on your goals and preferences—so you can bring those ideas to your doctor or dietitian for review. Use Case Example: 'Create a 7-day meal plan for someone with high glucose levels. The meals should be low in added sugars, high in fiber, and include vegetarian options.' Important: You should never follow a ChatGPT-generated meal plan without getting it reviewed by a qualified nutritionist or physician—especially if you have health conditions such as diabetes, hypertension, or food allergies. Health Issues Potentially Addressed (With Professional Supervision): Why It Works: Regular movement can improve energy, mood, and overall health. If you're looking for a starting point, ChatGPT can create sample workouts tailored to your fitness level and goals—but again, this should only be a way to start a conversation with your doctor or physical therapist, especially if you've been sedentary, injured, or have chronic conditions. Use Case Example: 'Create a 4-week home workout plan for a beginner who wants to improve energy and lose 10 pounds. No equipment.' You can also ask for modifications, time limits, or mobility-friendly routines. Health Issues This May Support (Under Guidance): Why It Works: Chronic stress can impact everything from sleep to blood pressure to immune function. ChatGPT can suggest mindfulness exercises, breathing techniques, or journaling prompts—but you should never rely on AI to treat anxiety, depression, or other mental health conditions. Consult a licensed mental health professional for diagnosis or treatment. Use Case Example: 'Create a morning and evening mindfulness routine for someone with a stressful job and poor sleep.' ChatGPT might recommend guided breathing, screen-free wind-down routines, or gratitude journaling. Potential Areas of Support (With Supervision): Why It Works: Diet and lifestyle can play a big role in managing high blood pressure. With this prompt, ChatGPT can generate a list of food suggestions and lifestyle habits that may help—but this is strictly general information. Use Case Example: 'Give me a list of 10 foods and 5 habits that can help naturally reduce high blood pressure.' ChatGPT may suggest potassium-rich foods, sodium reduction, exercise, hydration, or sleep improvements—but again, keep in mind these are only ideas and never a replacement for professional medical advice. Common Conditions That Could Benefit (Always Under Care): Why It Works: Habit tracking improves consistency. ChatGPT can generate checklists or logs to help you track things like water intake, sleep, mood, or steps—but even this should be shared with your doctor or specialist if it relates to ongoing treatment (e.g., blood sugar, blood pressure, fatigue symptoms). Use case example: 'Create a printable weekly health tracker that includes water intake, exercise, sleep hours, and mood rating.' Customizable trackers can keep you motivated—but always include your care team in the loop, especially when dealing with chronic conditions or if something feels off. Examples of Use: Final Thoughts: AI Can Inspire You to Get Healthier ChatGPT can be a powerful partner for generating ideas to support your wellness journey—but it must be used responsibly. It is not a doctor, not a therapist, and not a substitute for licensed medical care. Any plan, idea, or suggestion created by AI should be reviewed and approved by your healthcare team before you act on it. Use ChatGPT to help you explore new routines, organize your health goals, or clarify questions you want to ask your doctor. It's a brainstorming tool, not a treatment tool. When used this way, it can make your next doctor's visit more productive—and your health journey more personalized. Your body is unique. What works for others may not work for you. The safest, most effective way to improve your health is to partner with licensed professionals—and use tools like ChatGPT to help you organize, question, and plan more effectively. Related Articles: FAQs on Using ChatGPT to Improve Health No. ChatGPT is not a medical authority and should not be used to make health decisions. It can only generate general suggestions or ideas that should be discussed and approved by licensed healthcare professionals. Not without medical clearance. Every body is different. What ChatGPT generates is not personalized to your medical history, medications, or risk factors. Always review any plan with your doctor, dietitian, or trainer before trying it. Only in a supportive, informational way. You might use ChatGPT to come up with questions for your doctor or to help you better understand lifestyle changes—but management of chronic conditions must be directed by your healthcare provider. About the Authors Dominique A. Harroch is the Chief of Staff at She has been the Chief of Staff or Operations Leader for multiple companies where she leveraged her extensive experience in operations management, strategic planning, and team leadership to drive organizational success. With a background that spans over two decades in operations leadership, event planning at her own start-up and marketing at various financial and retail companies. Dominique is known for her ability to optimize processes, manage complex projects and lead high-performing teams. She holds a BA in English and Psychology from U.C. Berkeley and an MBA from the University of San Francisco. She can be reached via LinkedIn. Richard D. Harroch is a Senior Advisor to CEOs, management teams, and Boards of Directors. He is an expert on M&A, venture capital, startups, and business contracts. He was the Managing Director and Global Head of M&A at VantagePoint Capital Partners, a venture capital fund in the San Francisco area. His focus is on internet, digital media, AI and technology companies. He was the founder of several Internet companies. His articles have appeared online in Forbes, Fortune, TIME, MSN, Yahoo, Fox Business and Richard is the author of several books on startups and entrepreneurship as well as the co-author of Poker for Dummies and a Wall Street Journal-bestselling book on small business. He is the co-author of a 1,500-page book published by Bloomberg on mergers and acquisitions of privately held companies. He was also a corporate and M&A partner at the international law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe. He has been involved in over 200 M&A transactions and 250 startup financings. He can be reached through LinkedIn. Copyright © by Richard D. Harroch. All rights reserved.
