Pope Leo XIV spent a second peaceful night recovering in Rome’s Gemelli hospital after doctors treated a lung cancer diagnosis announced Tuesday.
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Pope Leo XIV is recovering in Rome’s Gemelli hospital after being treated for a lung cancer diagnosis that was announced earlier this week, prompting fresh questions about his health and what he may have known when he visited Lourdes in late September.
The Vatican said on Thursday that the pope had spent a second peaceful night in the hospital, where he is expected to recover for a week. In a brief statement, the Vatican said he “got out of bed and had breakfast.”
The diagnosis has unsettled plans around the pope’s upcoming travel, including a comment from Peru’s president suggesting the pope’s Latin America trip may have to be changed. The Vatican has not said when the pope learned of doctors’ suspicions that he had a cancerous mass in his lungs.
Ahead of the Tuesday surgery, the pope underwent preoperative tests that included a CT scan with contrast, a PET scan and a robotic biopsy conducted under general anesthesia during a separate, secret hospital visit. The Vatican has not publicly clarified the timing of when the pope learned of the lung issue.
During Leo’s visit to France, officials and Vatican watchers were left to reconcile his preaching and his physical condition with the new information. The trip followed the Sept. 25 to 28 pilgrimage window for the shrine in Lourdes, where millions of pilgrims go each year to drink spring water and pray for miraculous cures.
Leo arrived at the Lourdes shrine on the evening of Sept. 26 and went to the Grotto of the Apparitions, where reported visions of the Virgin Mary were first documented more than a century ago. He then performed the “three gestures” associated with seeking healing there: drinking from the springs, lighting a candle and touching the rock.
On Sept. 27, he celebrated Mass before more than 150,000 people, many described as sick, and denounced laws allowing assisted dying. He also approached a crowd of people in wheelchairs and allowed them to embrace him.
That day ended with Leo seeming to struggle as he walked among the sick while carrying a torch in the Lourdes torchlit procession, another central element of the pilgrimage. Later, while travelling home, Leo told reporters that he witnessed “almost miracles” in Lourdes, saying he had observed people “walking with, accompanying so many people who are sick and suffering and seeing how the grace of God’s presence manifested in many different ways, touches people’s hearts, transforms their lives.”
He did not portray himself as part of the sick, but he said he took a lesson from Lourdes about finding meaning “even in the midst of sickness or disability or pain of different kinds — their life has meaning,” according to his remarks.
Vatican watchers have also highlighted what they describe as a possible timeline for how much the pope knew. The former editor of the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, Giovanni Maria Vian, said there were strong suggestions Leo knew something even before leaving for France, and that the pope scheduled the surgery for Tuesday—typically his day off—“because he wanted to keep as much as possible the commitments he made.”
The diagnosis has also revived attention on the pope’s broader approach. Vatican observers said the “fragile” and “vulnerable” have become a central focus of his pontificate, including in preaching and interactions with ordinary Catholics who are wounded. Fordham University theology associate professor Natalia Imperatori-Lee said, “There’s something really beautiful in that even the most powerful person in the church is broken.”
Leo was elected last year at age 69, presenting him as a younger option compared with the pontificates that came immediately before his. Pope Francis was 76 when elected in 2013 and died in 2025 after a lengthy hospitalization for double pneumonia. Pope Benedict XVI was 78 when elected in 2005 and retired after eight years.
Earlier in his brother’s account of the diagnosis, Louis Prevost—who has had multiple myeloma since 2017—said he learned about the mass on Sunday when Leo announced it publicly and spoke to him afterward. Prevost said he asked if it was serious and that Leo told him, “They think it’s early enough. It’s small. It should be relatively easy surgery,” adding he did not believe Leo sugar-coated his condition. Prevost said he expected his brother to recover.
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