VATICAN CITY, Oct 12 (Reuters) – Pope Leo XIV will be admitted to hospital on Tuesday to undergo surgery to remove a small nodule found in one of his lungs, the Vatican said, as the pontiff maintained a busy schedule this Monday, carrying out seven meetings that had been scheduled for the morning.
Pope Leo XIV, 71, said on Sunday that the nodule had been detected in a recent examination and that it was ‘well-defined’.
The nodule was detected during a routine examination, the Vatican press office told reporters on Monday morning, before confirming that the pope is to be admitted late Tuesday morning, prior to the surgery.
It was not disclosed when the surgery itself would take place.
A regular update on the pope’s daily schedule for Monday said that he met with visiting bishops from Argentina, Nicaragua and the United States, among others.
In a meeting at the Vatican with members of a charitable organization based in Rome, also on Monday, the pope spoke in a firm and clear voice, thanking them for their work.
Pope Leo XIV, elected by cardinals from around the world in May 2025, is relatively young for a church leader. He enjoys sports, including tennis, and is not known to be a smoker, nor to have had health problems previously.
The Vatican said that the pope’s recovery is expected to take about a week.
A lung nodule is a small localized lesion that can be benign. The American Thoracic Society states that less than 5% of lung nodules, in general, turn out to be cancerous, although the risk increases with age, size and other factors, such as smoking.
Federico Venuto, head of thoracic surgery at the Umberto I Polyclinic Hospital in Rome, said that surgeries to remove lung nodules are usually minimally invasive and can sometimes involve the use of a thin camera tube called a thoracoscope.
“The rate of complications is extremely low,” he told Reuters.
UNUSUAL TRANSPARENCY
The decision by Leo XIV to speak publicly, on Sunday, about the surgery marked a contrast with his predecessor, the late Pope Francis, who died in April of last year at the age of 88.
Francis was hospitalized several times as his health deteriorated in recent years and generally did not announce his hospitalizations in advance, which sometimes generated media frenzy around his health.
The Canadian Cardinal Gérald Lacroix said on Monday that he was grateful for Leo XIV’s transparency.
“I greatly appreciated yesterday… (the fact that) he himself said: ‘This is what is happening,’ in a very transparent way, and asked for prayers,” Lacroix said. “I like that.”
Pope Leo XIV, leader of the Church with 1.4 billion faithful, had several public engagements scheduled for this week, including a Mass in St. Peter’s Square on Wednesday morning.
The Vatican did not say whether the Mass, the closing event of a week-long bishops’ assembly, will still be held. Although the pope will go to the hospital on Tuesday, the Mass may still be presided over by a Vatican cardinal.
The pope does not have a substitute who takes over his duties when he is ill. When a pope becomes incapacitated, the vast Vatican bureaucracy continues to operate normally, postponing any decisions that require papal approval.
