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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 needs no further treatment for his lung cancer.
His doctors, Dr. Luigi Carbone and Prof. Stefano Margaritora, said Wednesday that the final lab analysis of the tissue removed during the pope’s Oct. 13 surgery confirmed a pulmonary adenocarcinoma and showed that “the disease was localized.”
A follow-up review by oncologists, they added, “confirmed that no further therapy is required.”
In practical terms, there will be no chemotherapy or radiation, and no second operation is planned. Thanks be to God.
As I told Newsweek, this is a welcome conclusion to what has been a very terrifying week.
It began on Oct. 11, when Leo told the world from the Angelus window that doctors had found a nodule in his lung. Two days later, surgeons at Rome’s Gemelli Hospital removed the lower lobe of his right lung and confirmed it was cancer. He went home on Saturday.
On Wednesday morning, he went back to work.
Pilgrims began lining up in the rain around 5 a.m. for Leo’s first general audience since the operation, and the rain stopped just before the white popemobile rolled into St. Peter’s Square at 9:40, America’s Gerard O’Connell reported.
Leo waved with his right hand (the side where surgeons had operated), stopped again and again to bless babies held up from the crowd, and smiled at shouts of “Viva il papa!”
Then he took his chair and opened his catechesis with a word of gratitude.
“The first thing I would like to say is thank you!” Leo said in Italian. “Thank you for the support of your prayers. Thanks be to God for his generosity. Let us all renew our trust in God’s goodness and mercy.”
He was in surprisingly good form. Leo looked far stronger than he did leaving Gemelli on Saturday, and stronger even than at Sunday’s Angelus, where he promised only to “gradually resume” his activities.
On Wednesday he spoke in a strong, clear voice, and before the final blessing he led the square in singing the Our Father in Latin, eight days after losing part of a lung.
The Vatican did lighten the load.
Readings in Arabic and Chinese were dropped, and the formal program ran about 30 minutes instead of the usual 45. Leo stayed in the square for more than 90 minutes anyway, posing for a photo with over 100 married couples before greeting the cardinals and bishops.
He had already addressed a Vatican conference on holiness at the Augustinianum earlier that morning.
His theme was the family. Continuing his series on the Second Vatican Council, he turned to Gaudium et spes and called the work of protecting marriage and family life “more urgent than ever before.”
None of this would surprise the people who treated him. Margaritora, who directs thoracic surgery at Gemelli and performed the operation, told Vatican News that on the second day after surgery the staff turned around to find the pope arranging the chairs in the hospital chapel himself.
When they offered to take over, Leo answered, “It doesn’t matter. I can do it, so I will.”
“What can I say?” the surgeon added. “He really was an absolutely ideal patient.”
Readers of our series on Pope Leo’s life and formation will know where that answer comes from. Robert Prevost spent most of two decades as an Augustinian in Peru, where a priest who waits for someone else to set up the chapel usually waits a long time.
His candor this month came from the same place.
Leo announced the nodule himself, before the surgery, rather than leaving Catholics to piece his health together from rumor, and so the whole Church could pray with him instead of guessing about him.
More than 5,000 of you have written to him through our Get Well Letter, and Letters from Leo will carry every one of those letters to the Vatican.
We still need to keep watching.
Cancer brings follow-up scans long after the surgeons are finished, and Leo has said nothing, at the Angelus or on Wednesday, about the Nov. 6–17 trip to Uruguay, Argentina, and Peru, though his surgeon has said it can go ahead.
I’m confident his medical team will keep a close eye on him, and we will report every development here.
For now, the pope set the right example from St. Peter’s Square. He said thank you first, and then he asked the rest of us to trust in God’s goodness and mercy.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV and with every family that has sat in a hospital waiting room this year, praying for a scan to come back clean.
Wednesday’s news is a gift, and a gift calls for gratitude. Leo chose that word to open his first audience after cancer surgery, and we choose it too, for his doctors and nurses and for the pilgrims who stood in the rain to welcome him home.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for news about this pope that is honest and written with love. When the word “cancer” came out of the Vatican last week, tens of thousands of you came here first, and thousands of you stayed to write to him.
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Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.
Fantastic news thank God
May God continue to bless and keep Pope Leo, but I hope he continues to rest and care for himself - for his sake and for the sake of the works. He is a light in the darkness - we need him🙏