Pope Leo's recovery is going so normally that the Vatican has stopped the morning bulletins, and a Sunday Angelus from the hospital is being prepared

The surest sign of how the pope is doing is that the Vatican has stopped telling everyone how the pope is doing.

The Associated Press reported on Friday that Leo's recovery from lung surgery has progressed so normally that the Holy See has ended the morning bulletins confirming he had woken up and eaten breakfast. The bulletins were a ritual of reassurance for the world's 1.4 billion Catholics during a frightening week. Their absence is the update.

What the Vatican has confirmed is a working pope in a hospital room. On Thursday Leo met Archbishop Paolo Rudelli, the undersecretary of state, and reviewed documents. He celebrated Mass around noon in a chapel near his tenth floor room, for the second consecutive day, and began what a spokesperson called a little bit of work activity. His personal physician, Dr Luigi Carbone, and the thoracic surgeon who led the operation, Dr Stefano Margaritora, said a chest X ray showed good recovery of the operated lung and that his post operative course is progressing as expected. He has undergone physiotherapy and is carrying out daily activities independently. He is expected to leave Rome's Gemelli Hospital on October 20, a week after he was admitted, and his public schedule remains cancelled until then.

The next public question is Sunday. Vatican media personnel were seen at the hospital laying cables for a possible live broadcast of the noontime Angelus prayer, a thing hospitalized popes have done before and that the faithful read as proof of life and strength. Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the secretary of state, said a recitation from the hospital on Sunday is a possibility that depends on how the recovery progresses.

Underneath the reassuring routine sits the number nobody has yet. On Tuesday surgeons removed the lower lobe of Leo's right lung after finding a nodule, and the operation confirmed adenocarcinoma, the most common form of lung cancer. Whether the cancer reached nearby lymph nodes, and the tumour's size and molecular character, will come from pathology results that were still days away in the last Vatican statements. Those results decide what this diagnosis means for a pontificate that began less than eighteen months ago, for a pope elected at 69 as the youngest in almost forty years, and for the South American trip he still speaks of making in November. Parolin, who called the diagnosis a bolt from the blue, put the institutional position plainly: no predictions can be made, and based on what the doctors say, the pope will adjust his pontificate if it needs to be adjusted.