Is God Calling Pope Leo to Suffer for Families?

National Catholic Register, 19 October 2026

In 1994, John Paul II saw his hospitalization as suffering to be offered for families. Pope Leo’s surgery may carry the same meaning.

The hospitalization of Pope Leo XIV for lung cancer surgery was a shock — not that a pope was sick, but that this pope was sick.

Since 1994 — when St. John Paul the Great was hospitalized for four weeks after he fell and broke his leg — Catholics have become accustomed to popes who were elderly or infirm, or both. Both John Paul and Pope Francis spent the last years of their lives in wheelchairs. Pope Benedict XVI abdicated due to diminishing strength and was blind in one eye when he stepped down. 

The sight of Pope Leo clambering over rocks at Lampedusa on the Fourth of July was something not seen in more than 30 years — an athletic, physically vigorous pope. He is not photographed playing tennis and swimming each week at Castel Gandolfo, but he does both. Physical strength has become something of Leo’s distinctive style, including some of the signature moments of his pontificate: carrying the Jubilee Cross into St. Peter’s, the monstrance while walking the entirety of the Corpus Christi procession, the cross at the Via Crucis at the Colosseum, and the torch on his recent visit to Lourdes.

Given that patients can completely recover from lung cancer when caught early, it may well be that the Holy Father returns to complete strength soon.

In the meantime, could it be that his current diagnosis and surgery are providentially linked to his pastoral concern for the family? Pope Leo’s surgery took place during the meeting he had called to discuss the Church’s pastoral care for families on the 10th anniversary of Amoris Laetitia. 

Is the Pope being called to suffer for families? At his first Sunday Angelus address after returning from the hospital to the Vatican in May 1994, John Paul made that link explicitly.

It was one of the most personal addresses of his pontificate, John Paul reflecting upon his mission as pope, the prophetic insight of the great primate of Poland, Blessed Stefan Wyszyński, and the role of suffering in that mission.

He began by expressing “gratitude for the gift of suffering once again connected with the Marian month of May” — a reference to the assassination attempt of May 13, 1981. 

“I realized that it is a necessary gift,” John Paul continued. “The Pope had to be at the Gemelli Polyclinic, he had to be absent from this window for four weeks, four Sundays, he had to suffer: as he had to suffer 13 years ago, so too this year.”

What was the point of the suffering? John Paul had been reflecting upon that during his month-long convalescence.

The United Nations had declared 1994 the “International Year of the Family.” John Paul had written his lengthy “Letter to Families” to commemorate it in February. In September the U.N. Conference on Population and Development was scheduled for Cairo, and the Holy Father anticipated a global confrontation with countries, led by the Clinton administration, that wanted to establish an international right to abortion. 

“I meditated, I thought about all this again during my stay in the hospital,” John Paul said. “And I found again beside me the great figure of Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński, primate of Poland. … At the beginning of my Pontificate, he said to me: ‘If the Lord has called you, you must introduce the Church into the third millennium.’ He himself introduced the Church in Poland into the second Christian millennium.”

The great figure of the Primate dominated the Polish Catholic imagination. He too had suffered for the Church in Poland, confined to house arrest by the communist authorities from 1953 to 1956. Upon his release, he began a decade-long period of preparation for the millennium of Polish Christianity, marked by the baptism of Poland’s first ruler, Mieszko I, in 966. 

The millennium celebrations of 1966 gave definitive shape to the resistance of the Polish Church. Upon his election on Oct. 16, 1978, John Paul immediately understood that his mission was to do for the Church universal what Blessed Stefan Wyszyński had done for the Church in Poland, namely, to prepare for the Great Jubilee 2000.

“This is what Cardinal Wyszyński told me,” John Paul continued. “And I understood that I must introduce the Church of Christ into this third millennium with prayer, with various initiatives, but I saw that it was not enough: it had to be introduced with suffering, with the attack of 13 years ago and with this new sacrifice. Why now, why in this year, why in this Year of the Family? Precisely because the family is threatened, the family is attacked. The Pope must be attacked, the Pope must suffer, so that every family and the world may see that there is a Gospel — I would say a superior Gospel — the Gospel of suffering, with which the future must be prepared, the third millennium of families, of every family and of all families.”

Thus John Paul understood the hospitalization of 1994 specifically in reference to the family. It is possible to think that the same dynamic is at work in 2026, that Pope Leo’s suffering will bear fruit for the family. 

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