When Pope Leo XIV arrived last month in Lourdes, France, he immediately went to the Grotto of the Apparitions, where tens of thousands of pilgrims throng each year in the belief that it will heal their illnesses.
Leo prayed silently for several minutes before a statue of the Virgin Mary, and then, as pilgrims to Lourdes have done for generations, he touched the grotto’s rock wall, drank water from its spring and lit a candle.
In light of the Vatican’s announcement this week that Leo has lung cancer, church experts are now asking whether he already knew that he was sick when he went to Lourdes nearly three weeks ago.
It’s something that the Vatican has so far not disclosed.
The question — and the lack of an answer — reflects both the level of global curiosity about Leo’s predicament and the Vatican’s reluctance to divulge key details about it.
Despite intense interest from the world’s news media, Matteo Bruni, the Vatican spokesman, has not said when the pope’s condition was discovered and what might have caused the cancer.
That lack of clarity has left the Vatican press corps to seize on every recent statement, utterance or appearance from Vatican officials — including from the pope himself — and read into it, even if there isn’t much to read.
The tension embodies a clash between Leo’s right to privacy as an individual and the Roman Catholic world’s need for information about its spiritual leader. A pope is not just an individual; he is also a head of state and the leader of 1.4 billion Catholics, and his health will affect his leadership and could bring a new urgency to his plans for the church.
In one telling example of the press’s quest for clarity, Italian media read a lot into Cardinal Pietro Parolin’s impromptu remarks to reporters Thursday evening, in which he said it was too early to predict what the future held for the pope.
“The question now is seeing when he will return, in what condition he’ll return, what the doctors say, and based on all those elements, the pope will then reshape his pontificate, if it’s necessary to reshape it,” Cardinal Parolin said, the Italian news agency ANSA reported.
One paper’s headline: “Parolin’s worry.” Another’s: “Parolin’s alarm.”
The church has historically been tight-lipped, reflecting a prevailing culture of reticence.
The Vatican acknowledged that Pope John XXIII had cancer only four days before his death in 1963. There’s a library shelf’s worth of books with theories about the death of Pope John Paul I, 33 days after his election in 1978. (The New York Times did not even cover that papacy, as it coincided with an 88-day strike.) And though rumors that Pope John Paul II had Parkinson’s disease swirled for many years, it was only publicly acknowledged in 2003, when a cardinal made a slip during an interview with an Italian newspaper.
After Pope Francis was hospitalized in February 2025, details from the Vatican were so sparse that the rumor mill went into overdrive, with some surmising he was already dead. (He died just over two months later.)
This week, the fact that Pope Leo himself issued an announcement on Sunday that he would undergo surgery to remove a growth on his lung was portrayed as a positive attempt at transparency.
Speaking to the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, Archbishop Timothy Broglio, the top Catholic prelate in the United States military, welcomed the pope’s decision to “speak directly to the faithful, avoiding all the speculation and conjecture of the past.”
Cardinal Parolin, the Vatican’s secretary of state, told reporters on Thursday that he had been happy that the pope had been so frank about his health, “so there are no hidden agendas, the kind of things journalists are always looking for,” he said. He used the Italian word “dietrologia,” the belief that there is always a conspiracy or hidden motive behind the scenes and that official versions are smoke screens.
Still, many questions remain.
Leo had announced on Sunday that he had a growth on his lung, but the Vatican did not confirm that it was cancerous until after his surgery on Tuesday. It has since emerged that his doctors most likely already knew that the tumor was malignant before the operation.
Mr. Bruni said Wednesday that Leo had undergone three tests before the procedure: a CT scan, a PET scan and a bronchoscopy. Doctors said that the type of bronchoscopy performed, which requires general anesthesia, would most likely have immediately revealed whether the tumor was malignant.
Leo’s brother, Louis Prevost, who has multiple myeloma, a blood cancer, said the pope had told him about the tumor before the surgery.
In an interview with Newsmax, a pro-Trump news channel, Mr. Prevost recalled: “When he told me, well, I said, ‘Is it life threatening?’ ‘No.’ ‘Does it seem serious?’ ‘No, they think it’s early enough. It’s small. It should be relatively easy surgery.’” Mr. Prevost added that he had “no reason to doubt” what he had been told about the pope’s condition “so far.”
Some Italian media have speculated that the pope was aware of his condition in mid-September, before he traveled to Lourdes.
A church historian, Alberto Melloni, said the Vatican’s communication strategy this week was an improvement on that of a Vatican spokesman, Joaquín Navarro-Valls, who served two decades ago during the papacy of Pope John Paul II.
The day after Pope John Paul II underwent a tracheotomy in 2005, Mr. Navarro-Valls told reporters that the pope had enjoyed a breakfast of 10 cookies and a yogurt. John Paul died not long after.
Another Vatican observer, Giovanni Maria Vian, a former director of the Vatican newspaper, said it was “revolutionary” that the Vatican’s statements on Leo’s health relayed information issued by his doctors, who were named.
“This is certainly thanks to Prevost,” he said, using the pope’s last name. “In my opinion, it stems from the fact that he’s American and has this very serious relationship with reality and with the truth of the facts.”
I asked Mr. Bruni, the current spokesman, if the pope’s trip to Lourdes should be seen under a new light, given his cancer diagnosis. Mr. Bruni suggested I read what the pope had said about the visit to Lourdes while speaking to journalists on his return flight to Italy.
“Perhaps reading those words can be of help to understand what he was going through,” Mr. Bruni said.
During the news conference, Leo described Lourdes as a place “where people are searching for something much deeper, and understanding that their lives, even in the midst of sickness or disability or pain of different kinds, has meaning.”
Was Mr. Bruni saying that the pope already knew he had cancer?
Who knows.
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