ROME — Furnished in austere style, the papal suite on the 10th floor of Rome’s Gemelli Hospital is the roost of sick popes.
Pope Francis was admitted four times, including for 38 days before his death. Pope John Paul II was a more frequent inhabitant, his first time after an assassination attempt.
Yet everyone around Leo XIV, the relatively youthful Chicago-born pope, was so confident of his robust health that the suite was under renovation when stunning news arrived: Tests indicated that he has lung cancer.
“I am concerned,” Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican secretary of state who is the pope’s No. 2, acknowledged to journalists Monday, shortly before the announcement that the nodule removed from Leo’s lung was cancerous.
“I certainly did not expect something like this to happen,” Parolin said, adding: “No one expected it. But these are, as the pope said, God’s surprises.”
When Leo stepped out on the balcony at St. Peter’s Basilica on a May evening last year, the new pope, to many Vatican watchers, was heaven-sent. The first-ever U.S.-born pontiff with a second, Latin American citizenship. Multilingual. Unifying. And, after the prolonged health crisis of Francis, his predecessor, a spry 69-year-old, heralding the promise of a long, dynamic pontificate.
He may very well have one. But as Leo, now 71, recovers following his surgery on Tuesday, the world’s largest Christian faith is confronting the prospect of another pope with lingering health problems.
The pope’s “public appearances, actions, and schedule will obviously undergo a change, precisely to preserve a health level that’s certainly important,” said Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, president emeritus of the Pontifical Academy for Life. “Change will happen, but it must not be viewed as a debacle. A weaker pope not only won’t surprise me, but it must help us discover even more the power of grace. …. We must rediscover the strength of frailty.”
Leo’s surgery on Tuesday — to remove the nodule and part of his right lung where it was found — was called “successful,” and the pontiff himself has said it was caught “at a very early stage.”
Experts who are not treating the pope offer optimistic assessments. On Wednesday, Leo underwent postoperative blood tests and X-rays that his doctors described as “normal for the type of surgery performed.” The pope also did a round of respiratory physiotherapy, walked around his room and resumed his regular diet.
“Recovery is proceeding as expected,” his doctors said in a statement.
One potential advantage is that Pope Leo is not known to be a smoker, now or in the past, said Elise Ann Allen, a Rome-based biographer of the pope.
“He’s probably had a cigarette or two in his life, but he’s never smoked with any regularity or consistency,” she said.
But for the Vatican, Leo’s bout with cancer is evoking the kind of images from which the Holy See had hoped for a reprieve. The faithful gathered outside a hospital. The global pledges of prayers. The daily health updates. In one word — something the Vatican dislikes: uncertainty.
His diagnosis came at a pivotal time.
In recent months, Leo has appeared to come into his own — transformed from a tentative, slightly awkward public persona into a confident, emotive spiritual leader capable of drawing — and moving — vast crowds.
In the heart of secular Europe, arguably the church’s toughest audience, Leo drew an estimated 1.2 million to a single event in Madrid and a stunning 800,000 to an outdoor Mass in Paris.
Before his health crisis, he was preparing for the most important trip of his papacy to date: a 12-day tour of Latin America, including a homecoming to Peru, where he is a naturalized citizen.
For many Vatican watchers, that trip is being seen as a moment of affirmation, when Leo, drawing what is expected to be the largest crowds of his papacy, could emerge as a rock-star pope.
Now, there is speculation that the trip may be postponed. Speaking to journalists in Peru on Wednesday, President Keiko Fujimori said preparations for the pope’s trip continued but added that she was awaiting word from the Vatican given her understanding that Leo’s recuperation is going to take “various weeks, more than expected, so there could be a change in the schedule of his visit.”
Marco Politi, a longtime Vatican observer and author of “The Unaccomplished Revolution: The Church after Francis,” called the renovation work at Gemelli Hospital’s papal suite “an irony of faith.”
“Because everybody was thinking, we do not have to cope with such problems with such a young pope,” Politi said. “And now it is a question mark, first whether he will go to Peru or not.”
Leo’s medical challenge is also a test for the Vatican — a notoriously secretive institution that often has guarded closely the health conditions of popes. That changed dramatically last year, when the Vatican, at Francis’s behest, displayed a startlingly detailed level of medical transparency.
While Leo himself announced the discovery of the nodule on Sunday, Politi noted that the Vatican had withheld critical information that it finally shared Tuesday: Earlier tests had indicated cancer. On Wednesday, the Vatican did disclose the three tests performed before Leo’s surgery — a robotic bronchoscopy with biopsy, chest CT scan and PET scan.
“They need to decide — are they going to be transparent or not?” Politi said.
Leo is believed to be physically fit otherwise, regularly playing tennis and swimming. But even if the surgery Tuesday ends his crisis for now, observers say concerns will linger, with monitoring of the pope’s health certainty to be a mainstay of his early papacy.
Leo has a family history of cancer, including a mother who died after rounds of chemotherapy, and an older brother in Florida who is also battling cancer.
In another era, this would be less of an issue. For centuries, popes were precious prisoners of the Vatican, largely holed up in the Holy See, revered but remote from the faithful. Mass media — and mass travel — changed that, with Pope Paul VI in the 1960s becoming the first pontiff to fly in an airplane and the first in 150 years to even take a papal trip outside Italy.
Massimo Faggioli, a theologian at Villanova University, the pope’s alma mater, said that active international travel became a part of the pope’s job description in recent decades, noting that Pope Benedict XVI was believed to have retired in part because of his inability to keep up with expectations.
In choosing a younger pope, the conclave last year appeared to recognize the need for a pontiff dynamic enough to promote the church in far-flung quarters. Pope John Paul II visited 129 countries in 26 years; Pope Francis hit 68 during his 12-year pontificate.
Leo’s diagnosis “raises issues for the modern papacy, where the pope is expected to govern, but also to show up, to be visible, to travel,” Faggioli said.
“The pope is like a performer on the global stage,” he continued, “no less than a head of state or a big showman.”
Leo has been known to take his time to make significant decisions for the church, appearing to be in no rush to do so. Faggioli questioned whether that might change.
“It’s a reality check that length of this pontificate is unknown,” he said. “Now, it’s more uncertain than it was last week or last month or last year. So, we’ll see if some decisions are made more quickly.”
Stefano Pitrelli contributed to this report.
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