Pope Leo XIV's cancer diagnosis raises questions about the future and the very recent past

VATICAN CITY (AP) — When Pope Leo XIV was elected after the pained finale of Pope Francis’ pontificate, there was hope that a younger, healthier pope would be able to guide the Catholic Church for quite some time before age and ailments slowed him.

Leo’s lung cancer diagnosis announced Tuesday has thrown a question mark into that scenario and his pontificate. Already, the president of Peru is suggesting Leo’s upcoming Latin America trip may have to be changed.

But Vatican watchers say the 71-year-old's diagnosis could have other unintended effects — not all of them negative: It could propel Leo to accelerate his own agenda, which to date has been slow and deliberate. It also could galvanize support for him, bolstering his efforts to unify the fractured Catholic Church.

And most poignantly for his own ministry, the diagnosis has placed Leo squarely among the “fragile” and “vulnerable” who have emerged as his central focus. In his preaching, writings and interactions with ordinary faithful, people who are wounded take center stage.

“There’s something really beautiful in that even the most powerful person in the church is broken,” said Natalia Imperatori-Lee, associate professor of theology at Fordham University. “He’s been so, so eloquent on how our fragility is also a source of our strength.”

Leo was 69 when he was elected in 2025, relatively young compared with the two popes who immediately preceded him.

Pope Francis was 76 when elected in 2013 and had had part of one lung removed as a young man. Francis battled respiratory and mobility problems throughout his pontificate and died in 2025 after a lengthy hospitalization for double pneumonia.

Pope Benedict XVI was 78 when elected in 2005 and retired after eight years because he simply couldn’t go on anymore.

Leo was elected in large part because he was seen as someone who would be around long enough to stabilize and unify the church after Francis’ turbulent papacy, and get the Vatican’s finances, in particular, into order. He brought a youthful vigor to the papacy, bounding up the stairs of St. Peter's Square and zipping off to the country each week to play tennis and swim.

“It’s a big question mark on the investment that many people have made on this pontificate: an emotional investment, a political investment, even a financial investment,” said Massimo Faggioli, a theologian at Leo’s alma mater, Villanova University in Pennsylvania.

He noted that Leo has emerged as a powerful counterweight to the Trump administration in preaching a message of peace as the U.S. and Israel launched a war on Iran. He has become a respected moral authority on the need for safeguards on artificial intelligence.

And yet “even the pope gets the ‘emperor of maladies’ — cancer,” he said.

But assuming Leo recovers fully — and oncologists say his type of lung cancer has the best prognosis — Leo could emerge even stronger as a global figure.

“The mystique of the survivor is very strong in our culture,” Faggioli said.

Doctors on Wednesday said his recovery was proceeding normally. He walked around his hospital room, celebrated Mass and did respiratory physiotherapy while well-wishers outside recited the rosary praying for his recovery.

“He has always been very serene, kind and joyful, and he hasn’t lost that attitude even though the news came as a surprise,” said Tiziano Perrini, a Roman who came to Gemelli hospital to pray for the pope Wednesday. “So my perception hasn’t changed at all; in fact, perhaps it makes us feel closer to him.”

But if the future is uncertain, Leo can draw from the recent past to help get through it.

During his Sept. 25-28 visit to France, Leo followed in the footsteps of millions of pilgrims who flock to the shrine in Lourdes each year to drink its spring water and pray for miraculous cures for all that ails them.

The Vatican hasn’t said when Leo learned that doctors suspected he had a cancerous mass in his lungs. Before Tuesday’s surgery, he underwent a series of preoperative tests, including a biopsy under general anesthesia during a separate, secret hospital visit and a PET scan.

There are suggestions that Leo might have known something even before leaving for France and that he scheduled the surgery for Tuesday — typically his day off — “because he wanted to keep as much as possible the commitments he made,” said Giovanni Maria Vian, the former editor of the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano.

All of which makes Leo's visit to Lourdes all the more significant, if he had a hint then that he, too, was among the sick.

Leo arrived at the shrine in the evening of Sept. 26 and immediately went to the Grotto of the Apparitions where alleged visions of the Virgin Mary were reported over a century ago. He performed the “three gestures” of the Lourdes pilgrim seeking a cure: He drank from its springs, lit a candle and touched the rock.

The next day, he celebrated Mass before 150,000 people, many of them sick, denounced laws allowing assisted dying and threw himself into a crowd of people in wheelchairs. After an exhausting day and seemingly struggling himself, Leo walked among the sick carrying a torch in an emotional torchlit procession at night.

Leo told reporters en route home from France that he witnessed “almost miracles” in Lourdes “walking with, accompanying so many people who are sick and suffering and seeing how the grace of God’s presence manifested in many different ways, touches people’s hearts, transforms their lives.”

He didn’t include himself in their ranks, but he took away the lesson of Lourdes.

“Being in a place, especially like Lourdes where people are searching for something much deeper and understanding that their lives, even in the midst of sickness or disability or pain of different kinds, their life has meaning,” he said.

AP visual journalist Silvia Stellacci contributed to this report.

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