Well, bless his heart, the man did it. Pope Leo XIV walked out of Rome’s Gemelli Hospital on Saturday, four days after surgeons cut a cancerous nodule out of his right lung, and he walked out on his own two feet. No wheelchair, no arm to lean on, just a wave to the crowd and a handshake line for the hospital staff who lined up by his car to see him off. Seventy-one years old, four days out of major surgery, and he’s working the room like a parish priest after Sunday service.
Now, I have questions for whoever runs the modern medical-industrial complex, because the Vatican originally said recovery would take about a week, and this man was back to work activities on Thursday. Thursday! Two days after they wheeled him out of an operating room where he spent about three hours, with the surgery itself running roughly 90 minutes. Either the doctors at Gemelli are miracle workers, or somebody in the American healthcare bureaucracy has been padding our recovery timelines for years. I know which way I’d bet.
The diagnosis, doctors confirmed, is lung adenocarcinoma, the most common type of lung cancer, about 40 percent of all cases. That’s a serious word, and I’m not going to pretend it isn’t. Cancer is cancer, and anybody who’s sat in a waiting room while somebody they love gets that kind of news knows exactly what that word does to your stomach. But the surgery was described as successful with no complications, and Dr. Luigi Carbone, the pope’s personal physician, along with Professor Stefano Margaritora, Gemelli’s chief of thoracic surgery, said blood tests and a chest X-ray that morning showed he was fit to go home. So the medical men signed off, and home he went.
And here’s the part the cable news crowd can’t quite figure out how to cover. Before he left, the pope stopped to talk with a Ukrainian family outside the hospital. Not a photo op with a check and a podium. Just a man stopping to talk to people who’ve had a war dropped on their lives. Father Taras Kotsur of Vatican Radio’s Ukrainian section was with them. You can see with your own eyes what kind of shepherd this is, and it isn’t the kind that needs a committee.
The Vatican says he’ll lead the Angelus prayer from the window of the papal apartment on Sunday. From the window. The day after leaving the hospital. Meanwhile half the celebrities in this country catch a cold and cancel a whole tour.
I’ll tell you what this looks like from where I sit. It looks like a man who takes the job seriously because he believes the job actually matters. Leo XIV has been pope for a short while now, and whatever you think about any particular statement he’s made, the man shows up. He showed up for the crowd Saturday, he showed up for that Ukrainian family, and God willing, he’ll show up at that window Sunday.
So say a prayer for him tonight. Pray the adenocarcinoma stays gone, pray the doctors keep watching him close, and pray we get a few more years of a pope who walks out of a hospital on his own feet and goes right back to work. The world’s got plenty of leaders who take a sick day for a paper cut. This one just set the bar a little higher, and I, for one, am grateful.