Pope Leo XIV is recovering at Gemelli Hospital, and more than 5,000 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.
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Dear friends,
I wanted to get this to you quickly, because I know many of you have been waiting all week for any sign of how the Holy Father is doing.
On Friday, the Vatican released the first photographs of Pope Leo XIV since surgeons removed the lower lobe of his right lung on Tuesday. They show him in green vestments at the altar of a small chapel on the 10th floor of Rome’s Gemelli Hospital, celebrating Mass as the principal celebrant.
To my eye, he looks tired. In one image he stands with his hands folded and his head bowed, as if gathering his strength. The second catches the elevation, the host raised over the altar in both hands, and there too he is on his feet.
The Holy See Press Office said Leo offered the Mass at noon and distributed Communion himself. Several doctors and nurses from Gemelli attended, along with officers of the Vatican Gendarmerie.
In his homily, according to the Vatican, the pope thanked the doctors, nurses and orderlies “for the work they do every day caring for patients in their frailty, and especially for what they have done and continue to do for him.”
For the millions of Catholics around the world who have been praying for Leo since he disclosed his diagnosis, I find this a reassuring sight.
Offering the Mass is a priest’s principal act.
Robert Prevost has done it nearly every day since his ordination in Rome in 1982, and four days after cancer surgery, he chose to do it standing up for the people caring for him.
Earlier in the week, he had concelebrated from his hospital room, as I noted in last night’s update. Presiding is a different thing.
When Pope Francis spent 38 days at Gemelli with double pneumonia last year, the Vatican waited a month before releasing a photo of him, and that image showed him from behind, seated in a wheelchair and praying before the altar after concelebrating.
The Church’s calendar happened to assign a Gospel from Luke to Friday, in which Jesus tells his friends that even the hairs of their heads have been counted. “Do not be afraid,” he says. “You are worth more than many sparrows.”
Still a long road
The medical news is good, as far as it goes.
Leo’s physician, Dr. Luigi Carbone, and Professor Stefano Margaritora, who heads thoracic surgery at Gemelli, said Friday morning’s blood tests and chest X-ray “confirmed the steady improvement in his overall condition.” His recovery, they wrote, “allows him to carry out normal daily activities entirely independently.”
What his doctors still don’t have are the results that matter most. The Associated Press reports that they are still awaiting tests on the molecular and genetic makeup of the adenocarcinoma. Until those come back, no one can say whether it spread beyond the lobe or whether Leo will need more treatment.
Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago admitted in a new interview with Gerard O’Connell of America that the news blindsided him. “I guess my first reaction when I heard the news was shock because he is so fit,” Cupich said.
The medical bulletin hit him harder than the pope’s own announcement, he explained, because at the Angelus Leo had “downplayed it a bit.” Cupich said he has been told this kind of cancer is “common and very treatable,” yet he did not pretend to certainty. “Anytime someone has cancer, we know that it can go in different ways,” he said.
Cardinal Pietro Parolin struck a similar note on Thursday. The secretary of state said that “no forecasts of any kind can be made,” as I translated his remarks, and that Leo “will also adjust his pontificate, if it needs to be adjusted.” That sober line got a lot of play in Rome. The plain truth is that nobody, including the men closest to the pope, knows yet what comes next.
The Angelus
We do know one thing about Sunday. The Holy See Press Office said the noon Angelus “will take place,” though it has not said where. AP reported that Vatican Media crews were laying cables at Gemelli for a possible broadcast, and Parolin said a recitation from the hospital depends on how the recovery goes.
There is precedent for it. John Paul II, who was elected pope 48 years ago today, joked that Gemelli was “Vatican III,” after St. Peter’s and Castel Gandolfo, and he led the Angelus from the hospital more than once. Francis prayed it from a balcony on Gemelli’s 10th floor in July 2021, a week after his colon surgery.
Leo also has neighbors on that floor. On Friday the Vatican released letters and drawings from children being treated for cancer at Gemelli. One of them came from Angelo, a 7-year-old who has spent 36 days in the hospital after head surgery. “My mom and I pray for you every evening,” he wrote.
More than 5,000 of you have now added your own words to our letter to the Holy Father, and Letters from Leo will carry every one of them to the Vatican. If you haven’t signed it yet, I hope you will today.
Raising our voices
In last night’s update, I shared a short video Maria Shriver posted on Substack on Wednesday. Her challenge is worth repeating while Leo heals.
“While the Pope rests his voice,” she wrote, “may those of us from across the globe who rely on his decency, his morality, his integrity, his wisdom on so many issues, raise up our voices until he can speak again.”
Seeing him back at the altar today does not change her request. He is still saving his strength, and his voice, for the work of getting well.
So tell us in the comments below: what are you raising your voice for while Pope Leo rests his?
At Letters from Leo, we stand with a pope who spent his fourth day after cancer surgery at the altar, thanking the nurses and orderlies who are caring for him.
Catholics and people of every faith have been praying for him all week, and many of them have found in this community a place to keep watch together while the news keeps changing.
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Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.
He does look tired and he raised the host just to his face. But he felt the need to say mass. May God be with him and heal him. Holy Spirit we need Pope Leo.
As someone with a similar lung experience, that he’s up and moving is normal.