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Pope Leo XIV is walking again at Gemelli Hospital, and nearly 3,000 of you have now written to him. If you haven’t yet, please sign the letter today. Letters from Leo will deliver every one to the Vatican on behalf of our community.
Dear friends,
I’ve decided to hold my fuller report on Pope Leo XIV’s health until this evening, once all of the day’s information out of Rome has been collected. Please be patient with me. That report will go out tonight, and it will be free for everyone, with no paywall.
Here is the short version of this morning’s news: Leo is walking. In a Wednesday bulletin, his two doctors, Luigi Carbone and the thoracic surgeon Stefano Margaritora, said the pope has begun walking around his room after a session of respiratory physiotherapy. He is back on his regular diet and ate both breakfast and lunch. His blood tests and chest X-ray came back within the expected range. “Recovery is proceeding as planned,” they wrote.
Holy See Press Office director Matteo Bruni told journalists that, for now, the pope’s Latin America trip next month remains intact. I want to hear more from the Press Office before I say anything further, and I’ll bring you that tonight.
Leo’s older brother, Louis, also spoke to Newsmax on Tuesday night. He told the network the family is in “high spirits” and that his little brother is “ready to face whatever comes.” Louis is fighting his own cancer, a multiple myeloma that has come back, as I reported in September, and he received new cells in a clinical trial on Monday. I’ll have more on that interview later today.
If you haven’t yet, please sign our get well letter to the Holy Father. Nearly 3,000 of you have already signed it, which moves me more than I can tell you, and Letters from Leo will deliver every one of those letters to the Vatican on behalf of this community.
Why I’m writing about Chito today
On Tuesday, the New York Times published an analysis arguing that Leo’s diagnosis tests the assumption of a long papacy. That assumption belonged to nearly all of us. Leo was 69 on the night of his election, he plays tennis every week, and I suspect he believed he had decades of work ahead of him too.
I pray he does. We still have to be honest that we may have less time with him than we hoped, and so, perhaps, does he.
Leo has taken his time building a team. Seventeen months into his pontificate, he has yet to create a single cardinal. Francis, by comparison, gave out 19 red hats in February 2014, eleven months after his election. Leo has filled a handful of top Vatican posts (Bishops, Charity, Communication, Legislative Texts and Integral Human Development among them), though most of those picks came from inside the Curia, and much of the senior team Francis left behind is still in place.
That patience has protected things worth protecting. It kept Francis’s legacy intact, and just last week Leo defended Amoris Laetitia when his critics were hoping for a rollback. The Church also has to keep moving forward, and Leo knows that as well as anyone. Once he gets through this, I’ll be watching closely to see whether the pace changes.
That brings me to the man Leo has entrusted with the Church’s public face this week. Below, for paid subscribers, I tell the story of Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle: who he is, how he and Leo first met and became friends, and why the pope is leaning on him while he recovers. It builds on my earlier essay on Bob and Chito, and because it’s a full analysis rather than the news of the day, it sits behind the paywall.
