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Dear friends,
Pope Leo XIV is home. He left Rome’s Gemelli Hospital on Saturday afternoon and returned to the Vatican, four days after surgeons removed the lower lobe of his right lung.
His physician, Dr. Luigi Carbone, and Professor Stefano Margaritora, the thoracic surgeon who operated on him, said Saturday’s blood tests and chest X-ray, along with an assessment of his overall condition, showed the Holy Father was “fit for discharge.” The Vatican had planned on a hospital stay of about a week.
At noon, before leaving, he celebrated one more Mass on the hospital’s 10th floor.
Video of his departure, shared on X by Rich Raho, shows the pope tired in the face but walking well and looking physically sound.
That is good news, and I thank God for it. The story I can’t stop thinking about, though, happened the day before, and it had nothing to do with his lungs.
A call from Gemelli
On Friday, three days after his lung cancer surgery, Leo picked up the phone at Gemelli and called Vladimir Putin.
According to the Holy See Press Office, the pope told the Russian president of his “deep concern about the grave humanitarian situation in the city of Oleshky,” a Russian-occupied town on the Dnieper River in Ukraine’s Kherson region. He asked for a ceasefire so that food and medicine could reach the town, and so that residents who wanted to leave could do so safely.
Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s secretary of state, made sure reporters understood whose idea the call was. “It was the Holy Father who took the initiative to plead the case of this besieged city, where some 2,000 civilians need humanitarian routes through which they can leave,” Parolin said Friday, on the sidelines of a conference at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, which runs Gemelli.
The initiative, in other words, was Leo’s own. A 71-year-old man still healing from cancer surgery decided that 2,000 strangers trapped in a besieged river town could not wait for him to get better.
The Vatican’s statement closed by reaffirming “the Holy See’s commitment to promoting dialogue and peace,” and Parolin sounded hopeful. “I hope that, in response to the Holy Father’s request, President Putin will agree to do what the Pope has asked,” he said, adding that Putin’s willingness to take the call “may, I hope, be a sign” that he would.
The Kremlin called the conversation “constructive and conducted in a spirit of mutual respect,” and Euronews reported that Putin wished the pope a speedy recovery. It was the second time the two men have spoken. Their first call came on June 4, 2025, less than a month into the pontificate, and Friday’s followed August trips to Russia by Archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher, the Vatican’s foreign minister, and Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, the pope’s envoy for humanitarian affairs.
A pope who doesn’t know how to rest
Like a lot of Americans, Leo is not very good at taking a break.
Look at his week. He went under the knife on Tuesday afternoon. On Wednesday, the Vatican released his first message from the hospital, a note to the symposium marking ten years of Amoris Laetitia that carried a simple request: “I ask you please to pray for me, as I pray for you.” By Thursday, the Vatican said, he had resumed some work.
Friday brought the Mass for the nurses and doctors caring for him, which I wrote about yesterday, and then the Putin call. CBS News reports that he also met separately this week with Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, the dean of the College of Cardinals, and Cardinal Baldassare Reina, his vicar for the Diocese of Rome.
Even the timing of the surgery fit the pattern. As I reported on Thursday, Cardinal Tarcisio Kikuchi of Tokyo, who saw Leo the day before he entered the hospital, said the pope moved quickly on the operation so he would not have to cancel what was already on his calendar.
Leo is an Augustinian, and his spiritual father wrote the most famous line ever penned about restlessness. “Our heart is restless until it rests in you,” Augustine told God in the first pages of the Confessions. Leo’s friars have prayed those words for sixteen centuries, and I suspect their brother in the papal apartment needs to hear them this week as much as any of us.
Jesus, after all, told the apostles to come away to a deserted place and rest a while, right after they came back from their first mission exhausted. Rest is part of the work.
Still, I understand why he made the call. The people of Oleshky have no press office and no window over St. Peter’s Square. A shepherd who could speak for them, even from a hospital bed, chose to.
Sunday at the window
The Vatican says Leo will lead the noon Angelus on Sunday from the window of the papal apartment, overlooking St. Peter’s Square. Saturday’s departure gave us a brief first look at him on his feet, and Sunday will be our first real chance to hear his voice.
Please keep him in your prayers. His doctors are still awaiting the molecular and genetic tests that will show whether he needs more treatment, and Parolin has said plainly that no forecasts can be made. A grueling trip to Uruguay, Argentina and Peru is scheduled to begin on Nov. 6.
More than 5,000 of you have now added your names 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, please do it today, and send it to a friend who has been praying for him too.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with a pope who spent his third day after cancer surgery on the phone with the Kremlin, pleading for 2,000 trapped civilians most of the world had never heard of.
Catholics and people of every faith have kept watch with him all week, and many of them have found in this community a place to pray together while the news kept changing.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for a Church that refuses to forget the forgotten, led by a shepherd who keeps speaking for them even when his own body asks him to stop.
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Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.
It's great uplifting news . May the Holy Spirit continue to heal Pope Leo . 🙌 We continue to pray for a full recovery.
Estamos a rezar pela sua recuperação, sabendo que a sua saúde está nas mãos de Cristo Jesus e de Nossa Senhora de Fátima.
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We are praying for his recovery, knowing that his health is in the hands of Christ Jesus and Our Lady of Fátima.