Pope Leo brings American-style governance to Vatican, even in health crisis

VATICAN CITY — There’s a telling anecdote from St. John Paul II's pontificate that illustrates how Pope Leo and his American style of governing have changed the Vatican and the way it handles papal health crises. The Polish pope, 84 at the time, was back at Gemelli hospital battling an acute respiratory infection, breathing problems and the worsening effects on his larynx of Parkinson’s disease, which had made speaking nearly impossible and breathing difficult. Doctors performed a tracheotomy under anesthesia, an incision in John Paul’s windpipe, to help him breathe. And yet the next morning, his spokesman gave reporters a remarkably rosy, seemingly implausible update: John Paul had eaten his regular breakfast of coffee with milk, 10 biscuits and a yogurt. “Something that would suffocate anyone,” church historian Alberto Melloni recalled Friday. “But it was normal then that they told lies about the pope. Those were the rules of the game.” Two papacies and twenty years later, Leo has changed the rules of the game. Not only did history’s first American pope announce himsel