For much of the church’s history, the pope’s body was closely associated with the sanctity of his office, as the papal historian Agostino Paravicini Bagliani described in detail in his 1994 book “The Pope’s Body.” Sanctity is often bound up with mystery, and so the head of the church’s health was shrouded in secrecy until the past century.

Pope Francis was hospitalized on Feb. 14, after suffering a bout of bronchitis for weeks and after increasingly finding it hard to speak publicly. His condition soon developed into double pneumonia. The 88-year-old pope,