Pope Leo XIV has announced that he will undergo surgery in the coming days to remove a nodule found in one of his lungs.
The Pope made the announcement on October 11 after the Angelus prayer in St Peter’s Square. He said the growth had been picked up during recent medical checks and had been found “at a very early stage”.
His doctors had judged it best to operate and he had decided to follow their advice, he told the crowd. He thanked the faithful for their spiritual closeness and asked for their prayers.
The Holy See press office said shortly afterwards that the procedure had been scheduled for the first days of this week. Its director Matteo Bruni said the Pope was expected to remain in hospital for about a week after the operation.
The operation was to take place at the Agostino Gemelli Polyclinic in Rome, which has treated popes since the attempt on the life of John Paul II in 1981. Pope Francis, who died in 2025, was admitted there repeatedly for lung problems in the final months of his pontificate.
Neither the Pope nor the Vatican said what the nodule contained. A lung nodule is a small mass of tissue, usually found on a scan, and most are not cancerous.
The announcement came at the end of a heavily European year for Leo XIV. He drew a crowd of more than 1.2 million to a Mass in Madrid in June and in September he ended a four-day French visit with a defence of the family in Metz, the home city of Robert Schuman, one of the European Union’s founding figures.
He had been due to celebrate a closing Mass on October 14 for the Rome gathering of the presidents of the world’s bishops’ conferences. The Vatican did not say whether the operation would take place before or after that service.
His first apostolic journey to Latin America is due to run from November 6 to 17, taking in Uruguay, Argentina and Peru. The Pope holds Peruvian citizenship and spent more than two decades in the country as an Augustinian missionary and later as bishop of Chiclayo.
Greeting a Peruvian group in the square moments before he disclosed his condition, he thanked them for praying for the visit. The Vatican has made no change to the itinerary.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said the calm with which the Pope had spoken was reassuring and offered him the solidarity of her government. Montevideo Archbishop Daniel Sturla asked Uruguayan Catholics to pray for a swift recovery and to press on with preparations for the November stop.
