The Vatican announced last night that Pope Leo XIV’s surgery Tuesday afternoon confirmed the diagnosis that had already been indicated by his pre-operation tests: pulmonary adenocarcinoma, the most common type of non-small cell lung cancer.

The pope had announced on Sunday after praying the Angelus at his window overlooking St. Peter’s Square that his doctors had found a “small, localized nodule in my lung. It was detected at a very early stage and is well-localized. The doctors believe that it is best to intervene, so, following their advice, I have decided to undergo surgery to remove it.” The Vatican said that the nodule had been found during routine tests.

The operation itself lasted 90 minutes, though the pope was in the operating room for three hours. Doctors removed the entire lower lobe of the pope’s right lung. (The right lung has three lobes—upper, middle and lower—while the left has only two because it shares space with the heart.) The Vatican described the operation as “successful.”

The Vatican said late last night that the lobe was removed in an effort to take out all of the cancerous tissue, but the procedure does not guarantee that the pope is cancer-free. Asked whether the cancer had reached the pope’s lymph nodes—a key indicator of a cancer’s spread through the body—the Vatican said it could not offer any information yet.

No information has been offered yet about what stage the cancer had reached, but further results from the tissue tests could come as soon as today, the Vatican spokesman said last night. Likewise, no information was available on what further treatment the pope might need.

Tuesday night, the Vatican said that the pope had returned to his room and requested dinner after having fasted for the surgery. Wednesday morning, it said that the pope’s night had gone “tranquilly” and to expect additional information later in the day.

Pope Leo’s schedule

The Vatican originally predicted about a week of recovery at Gemelli hospital for Pope Leo, but it is not clear whether that prediction has changed following the surgery. Before the operation, all of the pope’s audiences were canceled through Tuesday, Oct. 20. The Vatican has not commented on whether the pope will make his planned trip to Uruguay, Argentina and Peru Nov. 6 through 17.

Cardinal Joseph Tobin, speaking to America Monday, expressed concern that at least one of the destinations on the pope’s planned trip were at high altitudes, which can strain the lungs.

The pope’s operation appears to have been scheduled quickly, as it came in the middle of a meeting of the heads of the world’s bishops’ conferences that Leo had called to Rome to discuss Pope Francis’s 2016 document “Amoris Laetitia.” Pope Leo was scheduled to celebrate Mass this morning for the closing of the meeting and to attend its closing session tonight. Instead, Cardinal Luis Antonio “Chito” Tagle, the newly elected dean of the College of Cardinals, will celebrate the Mass. Organizers said that the synthesis document from the meeting will not be published tonight as originally anticipated; instead, Pope Leo will review the notes from the meeting after his recovery and then decide what to do with the meeting materials.

Another indication that the operation was scheduled quickly was Leo’s absence from an award ceremony last night, where he was scheduled to present the inaugural Pope Leo XIV Sustainability Medal, awarded by Villanova University, to Cardinal Michael Czerny, S.J. More than 300 people attended the event, including a large contingent from Villanova. The university’s president, Peter Donohue, O.S.A., presented the award in the pope’s absence, and attendees paused for a moment of silent prayer for the pope.

The pope’s risk factors

Before his diagnosis, the pope was generally seen as a healthy and active 71-year-old, regularly playing tennis during days off at Castel Gandolfo. Before his election as pope, he frequented a Rome gym up to three times a week, and his personal trainer said the future pope’s workout routine had the intensity level he would expect from a man in his 50s.

According to a recently released biography of the pope, American Pope: Leo XIV’s Road from the South Side of Chicago to Vatican City, by Daniel Burke and Scott Detrow, Leo was never a smoker, though the book describes how students smoked in class when he was studying at the Catholic Theological Union: “Each day, they’d crowd into classrooms, or down the street in spaces rented from a synagogue, and amid billowing clouds of cigarette smoke—one student with allergies wrote about having to sit on the floor to avoid the plumes—dig into their coursework.”

The biography details how both of Leo’s parents underwent treatment for cancer before their deaths. His mother underwent chemotherapy and, thanks to an experimental treatment, was able to live six years rather than the six months doctors had originally predicted; his father was diagnosed in the mid-1990s and “endured a long period of treatment before dying at his home in Homewood, Illinois, on November 8, 1997, at the age of seventy-seven.” Both parents’ cancers emerged in their 70s.

Last night, CBS News confirmed that Pope Leo’s eldest brother, Louis, 74, was diagnosed with a type of blood cancer in 2017 and was treated successfully in 2019; however, his wife told CBS that he “fell out of remission” three months ago.

Colleen Dulle is the Vatican Correspondent at America and co-hosts the "Inside the Vatican" podcast. She is the author of Struck Down, Not Destroyed: Keeping the Faith as a Vatican Reporter (Image, 2025).