Just before breaking the Ramadan fast on Sunday evening, Hasan Zaheda played basketball with his son in the tiny courtyard of the basement-level apartment on Rome’s outskirts where the refugee family is rebuilding their lives.

Recovery for the 88-year-old Holy Father “will certainly not be imminent,” Vatican officials cautioned, indicating a potentially extended hospital stay.

Time-honored rituals, drafted and refined over centuries, allow time for mourning and provide order at a dramatic moment of transition.

Pope Francis was recuperating on Tuesday morning, from two episodes of acute respiratory distress, requiring a return to noninvasive mechanical ventilation.

Pope Francis on Tuesday continued his respiratory therapy and physiotherapy at Rome's Gemelli hospital without a mask, taking oxygen via nasal cannula, the Vatican press office said after he suffered two episodes of acute respiratory failure Monday.

The Vatican said that Monday’s two crises were caused by a significant accumulation of mucus in his bronchial tubes.

TORVAIANICA, Italy (AP) — Moira Camila Garnica and a group of fellow migrant transgender women have been gathering at their parish church to pray for Pope Francis as he continues to battle pneumonia in a Rome hospital, about an hour away from this modest seaside town.