“He is not a man in a rush,” America’s veteran Vatican correspondent Gerard O’Connell often told me in the early months of Pope Leo XIV’s papacy. The then-newly elected 69-year-old pope seemingly had time on his side: He took a lengthy summer vacation shortly after his election and implemented a weekly day off on Tuesdays, which he would often spend at Castel Gandolfo, the papal summer home, playing tennis, swimming and responding to personal messages from friends.

Through the first week of January 2026, Leo largely followed the schedule of Jubilee Year events that had been planned for Pope Francis. The week after he closed the Jubilee Year, Leo shifted to his own agenda, holding meetings with the College of Cardinals that Francis had largely avoided, issuing a major diplomatic speech lamenting that “war is back in vogue” and that a “zeal for war is spreading.” Since then, he has traveled regularly and moved deliberately, if slowly, in his work to reform and unify the Catholic Church. At the same time, his voice has gradually grown stronger on the global stage.

The pope’s announcement Sunday that he would undergo surgery for a “small, localized nodule” in his lung and his subsequent diagnosis with lung cancer has now raised questions about the original assumption of a long papacy. The pope’s absence from long-planned major events this week—an award ceremony and a meeting of leading bishops that the pope himself had convened—indicated that the finding was unexpected and urgent, though one cardinal also reported that the pope wanted to have the surgery as quickly as possible to maximize his chances of traveling to Latin America in three weeks.

While the pope’s doctors have kept their statements limited, oncologists and thoracic surgeons seem to agree that for a nodule that “was detected at a very early stage and is well-localized”—the pope’s words, which seemed technical enough to be echoing what doctors had told him—a surgery like this one could well have eliminated the cancer. Still, the spectre of the pope’s family history with cancer—losing both of his parents to the disease, according to his brother John, and the fact that his brother Louis’s cancer returned three months ago—looms large.

Faced with the prospect of a shorter-than-expected papacy, questions arise about how Pope Leo might approach his time as pontiff going forward. Will he increase the pace of his reforms, working quickly the way that Pope Francis—who was elected at age 78—did? Will he prioritize rest and exercise even more than he did before? How might the diagnosis affect his messaging?

Already, human “fragility” was emerging as a major theme of the Leo pontificate; he highlighted fragility as a key element of our “magnificent humanity” in his encyclical of the same name and preached on its importance before a crowd of elderly and disabled people at Lourdes during his trip to France last month in the wake of a new euthanasia law. (Some now look back to that visit and wonder how much the pope knew about his situation before traveling to the Lourdes Grotto, which is associated with more than 70 healings recognized as miraculous by the Vatican.)

Leo’s message of “fragility” seems to have deeply affected participants in this past week’s meeting of the heads of bishops’ conferences on “Amoris Laetitia.” At a press conference late Wednesday night, the meeting’s theological coordinator, Father Philippe Bordeyne, described how the meeting moved from a limited understanding of “fragility”—applied in “Amoris Laetitia” primarily to people in relationships that did not align with church teaching on marriage—to one that included “a constellation” of different life experiences. Father Bordeyne cited the experiences participants shared at the meeting as the motivation behind this changing understanding, as well as Leo’s own words in “Magnifica Humanitas.”

What may be more significant than the messages Leo chooses to highlight going forward may be the meaning that we, as onlookers, take from seeing a pope publicly embrace his own fragility. Gone, it seems, are the days of the Roman expression “a pope is fine until he’s dead,” exemplified by the Vatican’s concealment of St. John XXIII’s stomach cancer and St. John Paul II’s Parkinson’s disease until late in both of their illnesses. Exactly how much is shared with the public will be up to Pope Leo, and we may not get from him the sometimes upsettingly detailed reports that Pope Francis allowed to be released during his own hospitalization.

Still, his announcement of his illness in his own words and the public revelation of his diagnosis within hours of doctors confirming it are striking in an age when, as Leo has pointed out, people work to conceal and prevent any sign of vulnerability—from getting cosmetic surgery to hide their aging to stockpiling weapons to deter attacks. Instead, Pope Leo’s calm, measured acceptance of his own weakness embodies the approach he has called for in everything from mass communication to peace negotiations: one that is “disarmed and disarming.”

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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).