Pope's recovery: Vatican: Pope can leave hospital

Rome. Pope Leo XIV can leave the Gemelli Clinic a few days after his cancer operation. The head of the Catholic Church will return to the Vatican today and say the Angelus prayer on Sunday, the Vatican said. According to doctors, Leo had the lower lobe of his right lung, which contained a malignant tumor, removed during an operation on Tuesday.

Leo's recovery appears to be progressing well. The day before, he had even phoned Russian President Vladimir Putin and called on him to call for a ceasefire in the front-line town of Oleshky in southern Ukraine.

Now the Vatican press service announced that the decision to dismiss the pope was based on new test results presented by his doctors. "He will leave the hospital early this afternoon and return to the Vatican. Tomorrow he will say the Angelus prayer from the window of the papal apartment," the statement said.

The news about the 71-year-old's recovery had already been very positive. Leo underwent a blood test and a chest X-ray on Friday, according to a statement distributed by the Vatican. “A sustained improvement in his health” was noted. At the Gemelli Hospital, the head of the Catholic Church even celebrated mass again together with some employees.

Leo was treated and operated on in the clinic in the northwest of Rome, which has a separate wing for the Pope. The Vatican published images from the hospital for the first time three days after the operation. It shows the pontiff celebrating mass standing up in a chapel at the clinic. The American native thanked the entire clinic staff for their work, it was said.

Leo is now receiving physical therapy to help him breathe after the lower lobe of his right lung was removed. Otherwise, according to the bulletin, he can “carry out his normal daily activities completely independently.”

The doctors have not yet provided any further information. This means it remains unknown whether the Pope is now cancer-free after the 90-minute procedure. The node removed was a so-called lung adenocarcinoma. According to experts, this is the most common form of lung cancer.

Experts believed that a positive further course of events was realistic shortly after the operation. In the best case, there is only follow-up care after the operation, said Jürgen Behr from the Chair of Clinical Pulmonology at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU). The loss of a lobe of the lung is not dramatic for patients. It is accompanied by around 10 to 20 percent loss of lung performance, which is often hardly noticeable in everyday life.

Torsten Bauer, chief physician of pulmonology at the Helios Klinikum Emil von Behring in Berlin, also said that if Pope Leo's lung function was normal before the operation, he would not be affected by the loss of the lung lobe.

It remained unclear, among other things, how big the tumor was, whether there were other nodules in the lung lobe and whether lymph nodes were affected - according to the experts, all of these aspects are crucial for the future prospects.

What further treatment is required after discharge will probably only become clear after further findings. The particular question is whether metastases have formed in the lungs or other organs. It is also unclear whether Leo will be able to go on a two-week trip to South America in November as planned.