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Pope Leo XIV left Rome’s Gemelli hospital on Saturday to cheers and applause from well-wishers, returning to the Vatican four days after surgery to remove a cancerous tumour from his lung.
The 71-year-old pontiff walked on foot through the hospital lobby and out of the building, smiling, waving and shaking hands along the way. He spoke briefly with the doctors who treated him and with hospital officials. He also paused to greet a 13-year-old Ukrainian girl, a cancer survivor who had come to wish him a speedy recovery. Shortly afterwards, his black SUV was seen entering the Vatican through a side gate.
His discharge ends five days of uncertainty that unsettled the Vatican and the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics, less than two years into the papacy of the Chicago-born pope, who was elected on May 8, 2025.
Earlier in the day, the Vatican said his medical team had cleared him to leave.
“Considering the blood tests, the chest X-ray done this morning, and evaluating the clinical picture, the Holy Father has been deemed fit for discharge,” doctors Luigi Carbone and Stefano Margaritora wrote in a note released by the Vatican.
Leo had been at the hospital since Tuesday, when surgeons removed part of his right lung. He celebrated noon Mass in his tenth-floor recovery room, as he has done in recent days.
Doctors say his recovery is progressing normally while they await test results that will determine the next steps in his care. Leo has already resumed some work, phoning Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday to urge a ceasefire in the Russian-occupied Ukrainian city of Oleshky. The Vatican said he plans to recite the Angelus prayer on Sunday from the window of the Apostolic Palace overlooking St Peter’s Square, as is customary.
Less certain is a planned trip to South America from November 6 to 17, taking in Uruguay, Argentina and Peru. Vatican watchers say Leo, who spent two decades as a missionary in Peru, is eager to make the journey but will likely heed his doctors’ advice. All his audiences have been cancelled until October 20.
The pope first disclosed the issue last Sunday after the Angelus, telling the crowd in St. Peter’s Square that a routine medical examination had found a nodule that doctors recommended removing.
