Pope Leo spends a peaceful night in hospital after lung cancer surgery

The Vatican's Wednesday update on Pope Leo was short and, on its face, reassuring: the pope spent a peaceful night in hospital after the operation that gave him a cancer diagnosis, and more information about his condition would come later in the day.

Leo, 71, was admitted to Rome's Gemelli hospital on Tuesday for surgery to remove a growth doctors had found in a recent routine health check. The operation lasted about 90 minutes and was completed without complications, his lead surgeon Stefano Margaritora and his personal physician Luigi Carbone said. To make the procedure curative, the surgeons removed the entire lower lobe of his right lung using a video assisted technique. Tissue tests during the operation confirmed what preparatory examinations had suspected: lung adenocarcinoma, the most common form of lung cancer. The pope woke normally and returned to his room on the hospital's tenth floor.

What the Vatican has not said is the thing specialists say matters most. The size of the tumor and whether the cancer had spread to nearby lymph nodes have not been disclosed, and those two facts decide the stage, the prognosis and whether more treatment follows. A lung cancer specialist at Georgetown University, Stephen Liu, told Reuters that if this proves to be a small cancer with no lymph nodes involved, the surgery itself is likely to be curative, while a greater extent of disease would mean a poorer prognosis. Patients usually recover from this surgery in about two to three weeks, depending on overall health.

Leo is relatively young for a pope. Elected in May 2025, he plays tennis, is not known to be a smoker, and had no recent public health issues before this week. He is the earthly head of about 1.4 billion Catholics and has no deputy who steps in when he is sick. All his public events are cancelled through October 20, and the Vatican has said he is expected to remain in hospital for about a week. An eleven day tour of Uruguay, Argentina and Peru starting November 6 was on his schedule before the surgery. The picture is an illustration of well wishers outside the hospital, not a photograph.