By Joshua McElwee
VATICAN CITY, Oct 12 (Reuters) - Pope Leo will go into hospital on Tuesday for surgery to remove a small growth found on one of his lungs, the Vatican said, as the pontiff kept up a busy schedule on Monday, holding seven previously planned meetings in the morning.
Leo, 71, said on Sunday that the growth, a small nodule, had been found on a recent check-up, was "well-contained" and had been spotted early. Ahead of his hospitalisation, the pope cancelled all his public events from Tuesday until October 20.
The nodule was found during a routine health check, the Vatican press office told journalists earlier on Monday, before confirming that the pope is expected to be hospitalised late on Tuesday morning, ahead of his surgery.
It did not say when the actual operation would take place.
A regular advisory on the pope's daily schedule, issued at noon (1000 GMT) on Monday, said he met that morning with visiting bishops from Argentina, Nicaragua and the United States, among others.
In a meeting at the Vatican with members of a Rome-based charity group on Monday, the pope spoke in a strong, clear voice, thanking them for their work.
COMPLICATION RATE FOR NODULE REMOVAL LOW
Leo, elected pope by the world's cardinals in May 2025, is relatively young for a Church leader. He enjoys sports, including tennis, and is not known to be a smoker or to have had health issues previously.
The Vatican has said the pope's recovery is expected to take about a week.
A nodule on the lung is a small, localised lesion that can be benign. The American Thoracic Society says fewer than 5% of lung nodules overall prove cancerous, although risk rises with age, size, and other factors such as smoking.
Dr. Federico Venuto, chief of thoracic surgery at Rome's Policlinico Umberto I hospital, said surgeries to remove lung nodules are usually minimally invasive, and can sometimes involve use of a thin camera tube called a thoracoscope.
"The complication rate is extremely low," he told Reuters.
POPE'S TRANSPARENCY ABOUT HEALTH UNUSUAL
Leo's decision to discuss his upcoming surgery publicly on Sunday marked a contrast with his predecessor, the late Pope Francis, who died in April 2025 at age 88.
Francis was hospitalised several times as he grew frail in his later years and did not usually announce his hospital visits in advance, sometimes sparking a media frenzy over his health.
Canadian Cardinal Gérald Lacroix said on Monday that he was grateful for Leo's transparency.
"I really appreciated yesterday ... (that) he himself said, 'This is what's going on,' very transparent, and asked for prayers," said Lacroix. "I like that."
Leo, the leader of the 1.4-billion-member Church, had several public appointments on his calendar for this week, including a Mass in St. Peter's Square on Wednesday morning.
The Vatican said the Mass would now be led by Filipino Cardinal Luis Tagle, a Vatican official whom Leo last week approved as the dean of the Church's College of Cardinals, in the first selection of an Asian cleric to the elite role.
In the event of a papal death or resignation, the dean of the cardinals is responsible for organizing the secret conclave to elect his successor.
The pope is the final earthly authority for the world's Catholics and does not have a deputy who steps in when he is sick. When a pope is incapacitated, the business of the Vatican's vast bureaucracy carries on as usual, holding off on any decisions that require papal approval.
(Reporting by Joshua McElwee, additional reporting by Cristiano Corvino and Clara Schoenthaler, editing by Keith Weir)
