Parolin Says Pope Leo XIV May “Adjust His Pontificate” as Doubts Grow Over Latin America Trip

The Pillar reports the Peru leg will likely shrink, and La Repubblica says doctors spotted the tumor a month ago. While Leo rests his voice, Maria Shriver is asking us to raise ours.

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Dear friends,

Forgive me for landing in your inbox at this late hour. The news about Pope Leo XIV’s health has kept moving all day, and I would rather you hear it from us tonight than piece it together in the morning.

The biggest development on Thursday came from Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican secretary of state. He visited Leo at Gemelli Hospital and told reporters on his way out, “Yes, I found him well.” A few hours later, at a reception at the Iraqi embassy in Rome, his tone was heavier. “I am still concerned,” Parolin said, according to Infovaticana.

Asked about the months ahead, he gave this answer:

“It has only been two days since the pope was hospitalized; no forecasts of any kind can be made. We have to see when he returns and what the doctors say. And, depending on all these factors, the pope will also adjust his pontificate, if it needs to be adjusted.”

Some outlets have treated that last sentence as a bombshell. La Repubblica built its story around Parolin’s “concern” and the line “the pontificate could change,” while Infovaticana called the cardinal “a master of the art of saying nothing” and accused him of feeding the very speculation he warned against.

I read it differently. In yesterday’s essay on Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, I argued that Leo has governed as though the calendar were on his side, and that losing a lobe of his right lung changes that bet. “He may well have the twenty years we all assumed,” I wrote. “My hope is that he spends the next few as if he might not.”

Parolin, as I hear him, was describing that same reckoning in his own diplomatic cadence. A 71-year-old pope recovering from cancer surgery will think harder about which cardinals to name, and about how quickly to finish the reforms he has only begun. Call it apostolic urgency.

The Church should welcome it.

The medical news itself remains encouraging. Thursday’s bulletin reported normal tests, good recovery of the operated lung, and a postoperative course that “is progressing normally,” and Leo has concelebrated Mass from his room.

What the Vatican still has not disclosed is the stage of the adenocarcinoma, or whether the lymph nodes removed during surgery were clear. Those two facts will decide whether he needs further treatment.

The trip

That unanswered question hangs over the trip to Uruguay, Argentina and Peru, scheduled for Nov. 6 to 17. Parolin said the plan when Leo entered the hospital was for the journey to go ahead as scheduled, though “it will depend on how things unfold.”

Edgar Beltrán of The Pillar reported Thursday night that sources in Rome and Lima expect the Peruvian leg to shrink even if the pope flies. A senior Vatican official told him the stops in Argentina and Uruguay are “relatively simple” because the flights are short. “But the schedule in Peru is much more intense and complicated,” the official said. “Cusco is 3,400 meters above sea level, so there’s concern about that.”

According to Beltrán, the day trip to Cusco and Pucallpa could be scrapped, as could a helicopter visit to Santa Cruz in the mountains near Chiclayo, and the stay in Lima may be cut to a day or two so Leo can rest. The full itinerary calls for 12 flights in 12 days.

The piece’s most striking line concerns timing. Some authorities close to the trip, Beltrán writes, have allowed that it could be delayed altogether. Uruguay’s Cardinal Daniel Sturla said in an Oct. 14 interview that “it is possible that the doctors won’t allow the pope to come now because he needs treatment, but that he comes at a later date.”

Peruvian President Keiko Fujimori said the same day that his recovery may take “longer than expected.”

Beltrán also notes that Leo rushed the surgery so he would not have to cancel; Cardinal Tarcisius Kikuchi of Tokyo, who saw the pope on Oct. 12, said Leo told him exactly that. My read is that the Vatican lightens the trip and keeps it, unless the pathology report brings bad news

What La Repubblica found

Michele Bocci and Iacopo Scaramuzzi of La Repubblica have also reconstructed when the pope learned something was wrong. Here is my translation of the key passage:

“The Vatican has never said when the pope found out he had a lung tumor. His doctors reportedly came upon the problem by chance some time after mid-September, around the 14th, Leo’s birthday, during a routine abdominal MRI carried out discreetly at Fatebenefratelli Hospital. Doctors call this an ‘incidentaloma,’ a tumor discovered accidentally during an exam meant to check for something else. They spotted a nodule in the lower part of the lungs and decided to investigate further without delay. At least at first, however, it remained nothing more than a suspicion.”

The paper notes that the Vatican released the Latin America itinerary on Sept. 21 and that Leo flew to France on Sept. 25, both signs that no one yet considered the trip at risk.

Even so, La Repubblica reports, he seemed to sense that something was off, and during the France visit he was seen in conversation with his physician, Dr. Luigi Carbone.

If that account holds, Leo carried this for roughly four weeks while keeping a full public schedule, and then chose to tell the world himself at the Angelus once the diagnosis firmed up.

Raising our voices

On Wednesday evening, Maria Shriver posted a short video on Substack that moved me.

“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.”

She used hers to call for more federal investment in Alzheimer’s research and to protest the Pentagon’s plan to televise an execution, the same one the U.S. military archbishop has ordered Catholic troops not to take part in.

I think we should take up her mantle.

Leo spent the days before his surgery speaking for people the powerful would rather forget, and he condemned the death penalty again on Oct. 10, after the Pentagon’s announcement.

So if you’re open to it, tell me in the comments below what you will speak up for while the pope rests his own voice.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with a pope who has spent his strength defending the condemned, the migrant and the sick, and who now needs the rest of us to carry that witness while he heals.

People of every faith are praying for him this week, and many of them are hungry for a Church that keeps speaking when its shepherd cannot.

If you believe that witness matters, I am asking you to join us.

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Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.