By Miguel Escrivá
Since last Sunday, at the end of the Angelus, Leo XIV announced that doctors had found a circumscribed nodule in his lung, the Holy See Press Office has maintained a steady flow of statements about his condition. From them we know that the Pope was admitted to the Gemelli Polyclinic late in the morning of Tuesday, October 13, that the thoracic surgery team led by Professor Stefano Margaritora removed the lower lobe of his right lung using video-assisted technique, that examination of the specimen confirmed an adenocarcinoma, and that in the hours that followed the Pontiff was already walking around the room, had resumed his usual diet and had begun physiotherapy exercises. His audiences remain suspended until October 20, and the trip to Latin America, scheduled between November 6 and 17, remains on the calendar for now, although in Rome it is considered impossible.
The medical information provided is precise and responds to the faithful’s natural interest in their shepherd’s health. Yet amid all these clinical details, there is, by contrast, no reference to the patient’s spiritual care, an absence that is not new and that draws a clear line of continuity between the bulletins of the previous pontificate and those of the present one.
An inherited language
The successive hospitalizations of Francis, from the 2021 colon surgery to the thirty-eight days of bilateral pneumonia in 2025, established a vocabulary that today feels familiar to any reader of religious news: the Holy Father has rested well, has spent a peaceful night, has gotten up and had breakfast, has read the newspapers. It was never publicly stated whether Francis received the Anointing of the Sick, and references to his sacramental care were scarce.
The Holy See’s practice was not always this way. When John Paul II was dying in April 2005, the Press Office under Joaquín Navarro-Valls reported that he had received the Anointing of the Sick, and his secretary, Stanisław Dziwisz, later recounted that it had already been administered to him in 1981, at the Gemelli itself, before he was operated on after the assassination attempt in St. Peter’s Square. None of those reports compromised the Pontiff’s privacy or fueled unwarranted alarm; they formed part of the complete account of a Christian who was ill.
The pedagogical dimension
A pope’s illness has always been, in addition to a medical matter, an occasion for teaching. John Paul II turned his final years into a long catechesis on the Christian meaning of suffering, the same one he had set forth in writing in the apostolic letter Salvifici doloris. The Council, for its part, wanted the ancient extreme unction to be renamed the Anointing of the Sick precisely to dispel the idea, still widespread in many families, that it is a rite reserved for the dying and should be delayed until the very last moment so as not to frighten the patient.
The statements about the Pope’s health reach millions of people around the world and are read with an attention few magisterial documents achieve. A single line indicating that the Holy Father went to confession, received the Anointing before the operation, and receives Communion daily in his room would have a catechetical reach difficult to match, because it would show, with the authority of example, what the order of priorities is for a Catholic facing serious illness. Its sustained omission over the years also conveys a message, even if no one intends it: that sacramental life belongs to a reserved sphere, that it does not deserve to appear alongside the details that truly matter about breakfasts and diet.
From this platform we do not doubt that Leo XIV is receiving the spiritual care that is his due—surely he is. We ask only, with all due respect, that those responsible for the Press Office return to the practice of 2005 and include in their bulletins, alongside the state of the wound and the quality of sleep, news of the sacraments received, so that the faithful who follow the Pope’s convalescence hour by hour may also know how the Church accompanies him in his illness.