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More than 5,000 of you have now written to Pope Leo XIV through our Get Well Letter, and Letters from Leo will carry every one of them to the Vatican. If you haven’t added yours, sign your name and a prayer here.
Pope Leo XIV appeared at the window of the Apostolic Palace at noon on Sunday, five days after surgeons at Rome’s Gemelli Hospital removed a cancerous tumor from his right lung, and wished a packed St. Peter’s Square a happy Sunday in a firm, steady voice.
After the prayer, he said thank you.
“I would like to thank all those who have prayed for me in recent days,” the 71-year-old pope told the crowd in Italian. “I have truly sensed your support.”
He thanked “the doctors, nurses and all the staff of the Gemelli Hospital,” and he said the experience had made him “feel particularly close to all those who are living with illness or infirmity.” Then he made a promise: “I will gradually resume my activities.”
That promise lands at the end of a week many Catholics will not soon forget.
A week ago, from the same window, Leo told the faithful that doctors had found a nodule in his lung and that he had “decided to have surgery,” as I reported that morning. On Tuesday, surgeons removed the lower lobe of his right lung. By evening the diagnosis was public: lung adenocarcinoma, the most common form of non-small cell lung cancer.
The days that followed tested everyone’s nerves. On Wednesday, Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle read Leo’s homily in St. Peter’s Square under a special papal mandate (paid subscribers can read why Leo trusts the Filipino cardinal as much as anyone in Rome). Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the secretary of state, conceded that the pope might have to “adjust his pontificate,” and The Pillar reported that the Peru leg of next month’s trip would likely shrink. Washington, meanwhile, took 81 hours to say a word.
Then the news began to turn.
Leo went back to work from his hospital room on Thursday. On Friday the Vatican released the first photos of him since the operation, standing in green vestments at the altar of the hospital chapel.
That same day, Parolin confirmed that the pope had phoned Vladimir Putin from Gemelli to plead for some 2,000 civilians trapped in Oleshky, and he said the call was Leo’s own idea. On Saturday, Leo stopped to greet patients and then walked out of the hospital with a steady gait. Asked how he was feeling, he answered, “I am much better, thank you.”
“An ideal patient”
His surgeon then delivered the news the faithful in three South American countries had been waiting for.
Dr. Stefano Margaritora, who directs thoracic surgery at Gemelli and operated on Leo, told Vatican News that the pope left the hospital in “entirely satisfactory clinical condition,” with normal blood work and normal heart function. He expects a full recovery “in another 10 days or so.” On the Nov. 6–17 journey to Uruguay, Argentina, and Peru, he was plain: there are “no clinical reasons” the trip should not go ahead.
Margaritora called Leo “an ideal patient,” a man who had put “his heart and soul” into getting better, and he told a story to make the point. On the second day after the operation, the medical staff found the pope in the hospital chapel arranging the chairs himself. When they told him they could take care of it, Leo replied, “It doesn’t matter, I can do it, so I will.”
Readers of our series on Pope Leo’s life and formation will recognize the man in that answer. Robert Prevost spent roughly two decades as an Augustinian in Peru, first as a young missionary priest in Chulucanas and Trujillo and later as bishop of Chiclayo.
Sunday’s Gospel gave the moment its frame. Leo preached on the Pharisees who tried to trap Jesus with a question about Caesar’s coin, and he drew from the passage a God who “is not afraid of history” and chooses to dwell within it.
Catholics believe the same thing about sickness. The Church counts visiting the sick among the works of mercy, and it anoints the seriously ill with a sacrament of its own, because it has always believed God keeps watch at the bedside. Leo spent this week inside that teaching. He said Mass in a hospital chapel, and on Sunday he told a square full of pilgrims that his own illness had drawn him closer to everyone lying in a hospital bed.
His candor about his body continues a half-century turn in how the Vatican talks about a pope’s health. A generation ago, the Vatican spent years declining to confirm John Paul II’s Parkinson’s disease; Leo announced his own surgery from a window and, a week later, thanked the Gemelli nurses from the same spot.
Sunday also marked the 100th World Mission Day, and Leo used it to ask the Church to stay faithful to the Risen Lord’s command to proclaim the Gospel to all creation. Next month he intends to carry that command back to the continent that formed him. According to the Associated Press, the itinerary includes a dozen flights and two helicopter rides to high altitudes, and it ends in Peru, the country whose citizenship he holds and whose people he served for some two decades.
Nobody should pretend this was an easy week. A 71-year-old man heard the word cancer, gave up part of a lung, and asked the whole Church to pray for him. It ended with Leo back at his window and his surgeon clearing him to fly to South America.
We have every reason to hope.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV and with everyone who spent this week praying for him in a hospital waiting room or at a kitchen table late at night.
More than 5,000 of you have written to the Holy Father through our Get Well Letter, and we will deliver every one of those letters to the Vatican on behalf of this community. The pope felt those prayers this week, and he said so himself.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for a Church that tells the truth about suffering and refuses to surrender its hope.
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Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.
So wonderful to see him and to hear his strong, kind voice.
Pope Leo XIV ALWAYS gives me HOPE!
God Bless our Beloved Pope Leo XIV!