Pope to undergo surgery for hernia, expected to remain in hospital

by CNS · June 7, 2023

Pope Francis places a white rose on a reliquary containing the relics of St Thérèse of Lisieux before the start of his general audience in St Peter’s Square at the Vatican today and gives his blessing at the end. The pope is scheduled to have surgery today.🙏(CNS photos/Lola Gomez)

By Justin McLellan, CNS – Pope Francis was scheduled to undergo surgery at Rome’s Gemelli hospital on June 7 to treat a hernia that had developed at an incision of a previous operation, the Vatican said.

The pope was to be put under general anaesthesia and undergo abdominal surgery involving “plastic surgery on the abdominal wall with prosthesis,” Matteo Bruni, director of the Vatican press office, said in a brief statement released shortly after the pope’s morning general audience June 7.

He was expected to remain in the hospital for several days.

The operation, “agreed upon in recent days by the medical team assisting the Holy Father, has become necessary due to an incisional hernia” causing “recurring, painful and worsening” intestinal blockage, the statement said. An incisional hernia might occur at the site of an incision in the abdominal wall.

The pope briefly visited the Gemelli hospital’s geriatric medical centre for a medical checkup and tests June 6. According to the Italian news agency ANSA, he was there for some 40 minutes before returning to the Vatican.

Pope Francis was previously hospitalised for 10 days in July 2021 to treat diverticulitis, a condition marked by the inflammation of bulges lining the intestine, and underwent a surgery that removed part of his colon. In January 2023, the pope told the Associated Press that the bulges in his intestinal wall had returned.

The pope has said that he did not respond well to the general anaesthetic used during his colon operation and said that reaction was part of the reason he declined having torn ligaments in his knee operated on. For more than a year Pope Francis has been using a wheelchair in many of his public events.