No smoke, no mirrors: Pope Leo just says he's having lung surgery
Rome's papal press corps holds a Monday vigil after Pope Leo told the world about his lung nodule himself.
"...and then he simply said it, from the window, in plain words," said one veteran Vatican correspondent, gripping a notebook he had bought for a decade of rumours.
Pope Leo's decision to announce the growth on his own lung at Sunday's angelus has handed Rome's Vatican-watchers their gravest crisis in living memory. The crisis is information. The Pope is now in hospital ahead of surgery on Tuesday afternoon, and his press corps has nothing left to decode.
On Monday, twenty-six accredited correspondents gathered outside the hospital for what they called a vigil for ambiguity. They held up their phones and waited for a leak that nobody needed.
Readers will recall the vote last week to make the surgery notice vaguer. It passed. The Vatican ignored it. Old hands call this the first truly surprising thing Rome has done in years. A fresh motion now asks that future bulletins be issued only in Latin, only at dusk and only by a spokesman who sighs before every sentence. Its authors say a church that explains itself clearly is no longer a church they know how to cover.
Some of the older men mention 1978, then stop.
"We wish him a full and speedy recovery," the correspondent said. "We just wish he'd been less clear about it."
