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Wednesday brought little news out of Rome’s Gemelli hospital, and the little that came was good. Pope Leo XIV walked around his room and finished his first round of respiratory physiotherapy, his doctors said. He is also back on his regular diet.
By evening, a Vatican spokesman confirmed that Leo had concelebrated Mass in a room set up as a chapel on his floor.
His blood tests and chest X-ray came back in the normal range for the operation he had on Tuesday, when surgeons removed the lower lobe of his right lung and confirmed lung adenocarcinoma. For now, we are in wait-and-see mode.
Leo also sent his first message since the surgery. Dated Oct. 13 and released Wednesday, the short letter went to the Vatican symposium marking ten years of Amoris Laetitia, the gathering he opened last week with a defense of Pope Francis’s document. He thanked the participants for their work and closed with a request.
“I ask you please to pray for me, as I pray for you.”
What the doctors are waiting for
The lobe and lymph nodes removed Tuesday are now with pathologists, and their report will tell Leo’s doctors, Luigi Carbone and Stefano Margaritora, whether the cancer stayed where they found it. The Vatican has not released a stage.
Gina Kolata and Carolyn Johnson report in the New York Times that genetic tests on the tumor will almost certainly come next. If Leo needs any treatment beyond surgery, those results would steer it, and the targeted drugs available today did not exist a decade ago. Dr. Robert Merritt, a thoracic surgeon at Ohio State, told the paper that choosing surgery first “is an indication the tumor is most likely early stage.”
Dr. Sudish Murthy of the Cleveland Clinic read the Vatican’s reports the same way, as pointing to an early cancer with a very high survival rate. As for the calendar, Dr. David Jones, who runs thoracic surgery at Memorial Sloan Kettering, told CBS News he expects Leo to be “back to doing what he wants to do around three to four weeks.”
Peru on Nov. 6
The biggest news of the day came from the Holy See Press Office. Asked whether Leo would cancel or trim his Nov. 6–17 journey to Uruguay, Argentina and Peru, spokesman Matteo Bruni said the pope still intends to go. It is the longest trip of his pontificate, with about a dozen flights and a steep climb to altitude in the Andes.
That strikes me as optimistic. Peru’s president, Keiko Fujimori, warned Wednesday that his recovery could take “longer than expected,” and oncology surgeons usually tell patients to wait three weeks before they fly. Nov. 6 falls 24 days after the operation.
Still, Leo built his schedule around this trip. Cardinal Tarcisio Isao Kikuchi of Tokyo, who saw him the day before surgery, said the pope chose to operate right away so he would not have to change his plans abroad. He knows his own body, and we have to trust that he believes he can make it.
Not a smoker’s cancer
Adenocarcinoma is the lung cancer most often found in people who never smoked, and nothing suggests Leo ever did. His biographer Elise Ann Allen told the Washington Post he has never smoked with any regularity.
That has people looking elsewhere. On Wednesday, Peruvian pulmonologist Dr. Hebert Cuenca told Latina Noticias that studies in Peru’s highlands have tied adenocarcinoma to untreated lagoon water and groundwater, which many rural families still drink. Leo spent the better part of two decades in Peru. Cuenca’s idea is a theory, though, and nobody treating the pope has raised it.
A family that knows cancer
Cancer runs through the Prevost family. Leo’s mother, Mildred, died in 1990 after a cancer diagnosis and chemotherapy, and his father, Louis, died in 1997 of colon cancer and heart disease, the Times reports, citing EWTN.
NPR’s Scott Detrow and Daniel Burke, whose biography American Pope came out last week, found a letter the future pope typed in Rome on Feb. 25, 1984, to his friends John and Polly. Detrow shared it on Tuesday. In a handwritten postscript, Father Bob wrote that his mother was still in chemotherapy but that the cancer had been arrested.
“She’s a tough lady and handles it all well,” he added. Earlier in the same letter, he called a move to Peru unlikely for the moment, though still possible down the road.
His oldest brother, Louis, has lived with multiple myeloma since doctors found it in 2017, nearly a decade ago. In July, Louis told Piers Morgan the cancer had come back and that he was waiting to qualify for a clinical trial.
He got in. Louis told Newsmax on Tuesday night that he had just received new CAR-T cells in Tampa, the same week his youngest brother went into surgery in Rome. He also passed along word from Leo’s staff that the pope came out of the operation “awake, feeling good, and was in no pain.”
Eighty-one hours
Leo announced the nodule himself at noon Rome time on Sunday, speaking from his window over St. Peter’s Square. Vice President JD Vance posted on X at 3:32 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday, 81 hours later, writing that “millions of American Christians are thinking about him.”
President Trump followed a few hours later. Speaking to reporters in Arizona, he said “I want to see Pope Leo get well” and called the prognosis good. Then he turned to the pope’s older brother. Louis and his wife are “big Trump supporters” with “MAGA all over their house,” Trump said, and Louis loves the pope a lot, which the president called “good enough for me.”
Most of the world moved faster. Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted Tuesday that he and his wife were praying, and members of Congress from both parties did the same, Reps. Jonathan Jackson of Illinois and Riley Moore of West Virginia among them.
Abroad, India’s Narendra Modi, Canada’s Mark Carney, Australia’s Anthony Albanese and Pakistan’s Shehbaz Sharif sent their wishes, as did U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres. Giorgia Meloni and Volodymyr Zelenskyy had written before the surgery.
The delay shocked me. The first American pope has cancer, and the White House let three and a half days pass before a single word reached him. That is remarkable, and I find it unacceptable.
So Wednesday was a cautiously optimistic day. The pope is on his feet and back at the altar. The pathology report will tell us more than any outside expert can, and until it arrives, the rest of us can do what he asked.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV and with every family that has waited through a pathology report or kept vigil at a bedside.
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Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.
Pope Leo XIV ALWAYS HAS the Love And Support of the VAST MAJORITY of the World!!
Praying for Pope Leo and his health. 🙏🙏🙏🙏