Next Wednesday, September 1, 2021, at 8:00 am (local time in Spain), an exclusive interview will be broadcast that journalist Carlos Herrera of the COPE Network (Popular Spanish Radio Network, property of the Spanish Episcopal Conference), had with Pope Francis at Casa Santa Marta.
The Spanish Radio Station states on its Webpage today, August 30, that it is the first interview that the Holy Father has given a Spanish radio and also the first after his colon operation. Herrera himself announced the news this morning live: “We start on Wednesday with an exclusive interview with Pope Francis,” made in recent days.
The Spanish journalist said the interview lasts an hour and a half, in which the Pope answers everything, adding that the team of the “Herrera in COPE” program went to Rome to confirm, through its correspondent in the Vatican, that the Pope agreed to the interview.
Advance
COPE’s Webpage has advanced some parts of the Holy Father’s conversation with Herrera. To the answer about his state of health, the Pontiff answers “still alive,” and adds: “a nurse saved my life, a man of much experience. It’s the second time in my life that a nurse saves my life. The first was in the year ’57.”
In regard to a possible renunciation, the Bishop of Rome says that “whenever a Pope is sick a breeze or hurricane blows of a Conclave.” Carlos Herrera detailed some points of the exclusive interview held in the Pope’s “residence, in Santa Marta,” where he lives. He stressed that “the only condition the Pope stipulated for the interview was that it be done in his house.”
The conversation between the Successor of Peter and the Spanish journalist took place in a small library. “We shifted carpets, in the best of senses, we moved tables . . . We placed ourselves under a Virgin for which the Pope feels great fervor, the Virgin Untier of Knots, and the Virgin of the Candelaria to whom we prayed a Hail Mary and we talked there practically about everything,” added Herrera.
During the interview, “the Pope talks about his health, about the rumors of his renunciation but also about euthanasia in Spain, about Afghanistan, about emigration, about Cataluña; he launched a message to the United States and to Europe about what has happened in Afghanistan, one of the subjects that most motivates him,” explained Herrera.
Translation by Virginia M. Forrester
