I was answering questions about health emergencies of past popes when news broke that the sitting one was sick.
Since I started covering Pope John Paul II as a young reporter in Rome, and through much of the last decade as The Times’s Rome bureau chief, the health of Roman Catholic pontiffs had been my professional preoccupation. I was on tour in America for “The Italian Job” — a book that begins with my mad dash back to Rome after Pope Francis died — when the Vatican announced that Pope Leo XIV had lung cancer.
It was odd for me not to be calling cardinals. But it was no longer my story. I had taken a new assignment in Spain, and there was a new bureau chief in Rome. Still, I shared my anxiety with old Vaticanisti colleagues.
“PTSD,” one religion reporter responded.
I had seen a lot. In 2004, I went with John Paul to Lourdes, France, revered for its healing waters, and watched as the 84-year-old man, afflicted with Parkinson’s disease, slumped on a white throne in a dark grotto, surrounded by the sick. A cardinal read a message for him. “With you,” it said, “I share a time of life marked by physical suffering.”
Nearly a decade later, after a reporting trip on a church scandal took me deep into the Vatican, Pope Benedict XVI became the first pope in almost 600 years to call it quits, saying his “advanced age” impeded him from leading the world’s one billion Catholics.
After I became Rome bureau chief in 2017, responsible for leading coverage of Italy, much of the southern Mediterranean and the Vatican, I quickly realized that nothing mattered more to my readers than the pope’s health. But I had a bad habit of being out of town whenever Francis took ill. It became a running joke inside the bureau that my holidays had a supernatural affect on the pontiff’s health.
As Francis’ health dipped, I came to dread “communication to the journalists” messages from the Vatican filled with diagnoses. The night before he died, I dreamed he had succumbed to “a fatal abundance of lungs.” In the morning, the Vatican’s message arrived, announcing that the pope had, in fact, died. In the pandemonium of rushing back to Rome from my in-laws’ place in Tuscany, I asked my wife if she thought I had some kind of premonition.
“Of course not,” she said, “it’s just that you’re always thinking about the pope.”
Francis framed ailments as natural expressions of the limits that defined the human condition. There is a lot of Catholic theology behind this, but he and his prelates expressed to me that experience taught that limits gave shape to our actual lived lives, that they remind us of our common humanity.
That was a message that Leo took up. I had met him only once after his election and before leaving the Rome job in 2025. He seemed particularly hale. I visited the tennis court, next to St. Peter’s, where he played. I talked to his friends about “Bob’s” incredible stamina in driving long distances. When we shook hands, he struck me as limber and youthful, a Vatican spring chicken at 69. His health, I thought, wasn’t a concern.
This week, his limits emerged. But even as the “communication to the journalists” messages I still received from the Vatican gave me good news about his prognosis, I wondered if this scare might add urgency to his papacy.
Watching Leo, at first closely, and then from more of a remove from Madrid, it seemed to me he wanted to bide his time, settle into the role, concentrate on Vatican housekeeping and tend to some wounds opened up by Francis’ more audacious style.
Taunts from President Trump, who has called him “weak on crime,” and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s prayer for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy” temporarily drew Leo out of his shell, perhaps earlier than he had wanted.
Leo said he wasn’t scared of the Trump administration. He said God ignored the prayers of leaders who have “hands full of blood.” The existential threat of artificial intelligence also appeared to accelerate his timetable for stepping onto the global stage. In a major document, he argued that A.I. bots and agents “do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain.”
For a moment, he emerged as the heavyweight counterweight to President Trump and Silicon Valley billionaires that many liberals hoped the American pope would be.
But then he quietly went back about church business.
I have come to see two roads for lasting impact by a pope. The first is longevity. Popes name the bishops and appoint the cardinals who shape the direction of the church for generations. The longer a pope lives, the more his vision is solidified in the church. That seemed to be Leo’s path.
But this week’s diagnosis was a reminder that such a path can end at any time.
The other path, forcing through upheavals, making bold changes that will necessarily cause divisions in the church Leo hopes to unite, is a harder road, and requires a boldness that Francis himself only flirted with. Short or long reign, that way is there for him. The suddenly pressing question is what Leo does with the time and limits he has.
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