my essay in America Magazine begins with these few grafs, but please click the link to read the whole of it. everyone’s sites (even the Jesuits’) love traffic….
Dear Holy Father, I understand.
Well, I have an inkling anyway. I cannot claim to know what the pope is feeling or what his exact condition is, but I know what sticks with me from my own reckoning with lung cancer.
I know what it is to groggily emerge from the fugue state of anesthesia to find a surgeon by your gurney, leaning in, awaiting your awakening so he can break the news: “I’m sorry, it’s cancer.”
I know what it is to then, instinctively, as if to put form to this incomprehensibility, reach down to where your lung used to be, to trace the hollows now wrapped in gauze and bandage, chest tubes draining red, alarming red, from wounds that pierce your back, your front, your flank. I know the bewilderment that catapults you out of any complacency as you stumble toward this new knowing that now defines so much of you . . .
read the rest here….https://www.americamagazine.org/faithinfocus/2026/10/21/pope-leo-lung-cancer-faith-spirituality-catholic/
here’s the tagline i’d written (in hopes of making my publisher happy, but alas it met the chopping block and now withers on the cutting room floor…
Barbara Mahany, a former staff writer at the Chicago Tribune, is the author of the forthcoming Broken Open: How Our Most Fragile Seasons Invite Us to Extravagant Love (Brazos Press, February 2027), her chronicling of a spiritual epiphany in the wake of her cancer diagnosis. Since 2023, her quarterly lung scans have been clear, or in oncology’s vernacular, shown “no evidence of disease.”