ROME — Varvara is 13, her scans came back clear days ago, and on Saturday she walked up to Pope Leo XIV’s car outside Gemelli Hospital with a felt doll and a framed photograph of the hug she says got her through cancer. She told him their embrace in St. Peter’s Square last December had given her “the strength to overcome the illness that, fortunately, I have now beaten,” Vatican News reported.
The pope, 71, was going home after being in hospital since Tuesday. He walked out unaided and briefly greeted well-wishers before being driven to the Vatican that afternoon, NBC News reported. Surgeons had removed a cancerous nodule from his right lung, and doctors identified adenocarcinoma: Pope Leo has lung cancer.
The Holy See Press Office released a statement from his doctors, Luigi Carbone and Stefano Margaritora, saying blood tests and a chest X-ray on Saturday morning allowed him to leave. In NBC’s account they said “the Holy Father has been deemed fit for discharge from the hospital.” The fuller account came from the surgeon, in a Vatican News interview.
Margaritora said he believes Leo could be “fully recovered in another ten days or so,” an estimate he reached by treating the pope “as I would any other patient,” for whom a complete recovery takes “a couple of weeks.” Of the Latin America journey scheduled for Nov. 6 to 17, he told Vatican News: “I would say there are no clinical reasons why this visit should not take place.” That is a surgeon’s opinion; the interview does not say what the Vatican has decided.
How the tumor was found is the detail that sticks. It was “entirely accidental,” Margaritora said: a small spot at the base of the lung, picked up during routine abdominal examinations in a man with no respiratory symptoms. He said that if the spot had been a little higher up, it “certainly would not have been seen.” Leo disclosed the problem himself at last Sunday’s noon prayer, and the Pope Leo XIV surgery followed on Tuesday.
Margaritora called him “an absolutely ideal patient.” On the second day after the operation, he said, the team found Leo arranging the chairs in the chapel himself. When staff offered to help, Margaritora said, the pope replied, “It doesn’t matter. I can do it, so I will.”
On Friday the Vatican released the first images of Leo since the operation, showing him celebrating Mass inside the hospital. The same day the Holy See Press Office said he asked Vladimir Putin, by phone, for a ceasefire in the city of Oleshky, a Pope Leo Putin call that came while he was still a patient at Gemelli.
What remains unsaid is how far the cancer had progressed. The interview gives no stage, and NBC News reports that the Vatican has not said whether it has spread.
