The Breath Between Us
Lung cancer. In Yiddish, לונגנראַק, lungnrak. A few syllables bring the immense machinery of public life back to the vulnerability of a human body. On October 13, Pope Leo XIV underwent surgery in which the lower lobe of his right lung was removed. Examination during the operation confirmed lung adenocarcinoma. The Vatican reported that the procedure was successful, with further examinations to follow. Before any reflection on institutions, history or symbols, there is a person recovering from surgery, dependent on medical care and the attention of others.
Yet certain correspondences invite thought. They draw together things that had seemed separate: an organ, a remembered expression, the long development of religious communities. Something of what biblical language calls “God’s finger” may be sensed in this invitation to attend. No verdict of good or evil follows. No explanation of why one person becomes ill is supplied. The expression can name a moment when familiar events suddenly disclose a question that had been waiting beneath them.
Pope Francis had undergone an operation involving the upper part of his right lung in 1957, long before his election. Now his successor has undergone the removal of the lower right lobe. These are distinct medical histories, separated by almost seventy years. Nevertheless, their juxtaposition is striking: upper and lower, two successive pontificates, the same side of the breathing body. Vatican News’s account of Francis’s illness locates the original lesions in the upper right lobe.
The right lung also has a middle lobe; the correspondence does not need to become a complete anatomical equation. Its suggestive force lies in the span from above to below, from the highest aspirations to the deepest foundations. The body places all these questions within the elementary necessity of continuing to breathe.
The Catholic Church has changed profoundly since the Second Vatican Council concluded in 1965. The word aggiornamento, bringing up to date, suggested more than an institutional renovation. The Council opened questions about how the Church spoke to the contemporary world, approached other Christians, understood religious freedom and acknowledged its relationship with the Jewish people. The consequences entered worship, education, public speech and ordinary encounters, clarification of what the “Church” is. Their reception has remained uneven, sometimes fruitful, sometimes contested.
For Jewish readers, Nostra aetate remains a particularly consequential expression of this development. It recalled the Church’s bond with the people of Israel, rejected the indiscriminate attribution of responsibility for the Passion to Jews, and deplored antisemitism. Such words required changes in teaching and habits of thought. They also required Christianity to reconsider how it spoke about its own beginnings.
Rome’s explicit opening towards Jews and Judaism did not produce a simultaneous transformation throughout the Christian East: the conciliar initiative encountered strong opposition among Middle Eastern Catholic hierarchs, and its promulgation did not erase those reservations. Nor did it constitute a common Orthodox reassessment of Judaism; subsequent Orthodox initiatives in dialogue have followed without a comparable declaration binding all Orthodox Churches.
The movement towards Christian reconciliation acquired a human face when Pope Paul VI and Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras met in Jerusalem in January 1964. The place mattered. Their encounter occurred where the Christian proclamation had begun, in a city whose living religious complexity exceeds every attempt to possess its meaning. Rome and Constantinople met on ground older than their estrangement. Their embrace made visible a willingness to approach one another that theological declarations alone could scarcely communicate.
At the Council’s close, the joint declaration of December 7, 1965 removed the sentences of excommunication associated with 1054 from the life and memory of the Churches. Only rome and Constantinople signed the document at that time. Full communion was not thereby restored. Nevertheless, reconciliation had become an action undertaken together. Athenagoras’s visit to Rome followed in October 1967. In this sense, the approach to the Orthodox East belonged to the Council’s unfinished fulfilment.
John Paul II gave this aspiration an enduring bodily expression: the Church must breathe with her two lungs. In Ut unum sint, published in 1995, he connected the image particularly with Rome and Byzantium, extending its horizon through the Christian history of the Slavic world. It was an appeal to recover communion while honouring legitimate diversity. A breathing body offered a language of mutual necessity: each tradition had received gifts whose fullness could not be exhausted in isolation.
Yet the image can leave the imagination within the old division of East and West, shaped by the Roman Empire and its successors. Even the ancient pentarchy (of the Mare Nostrum) – Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem – cannot contain the whole geography of Christian origins and expansion. Beyond and across that arrangement lived communities whose languages, worship and theological imagination developed along other paths. The apparent simplicity of two lungs can conceal a much more intricate body.
Two successive anniversaries widen this horizon. In 2025, the Christians commemorated seventeen centuries since the Council of Nicaea in 325, whose confession of faith remains fundamental to Catholic, Orthodox and other Christian traditions. In 2026, Georgia marks seventeen centuries since the proclamation of Christianity as the state religion, traditionally dated to 326 and associated with the preaching of Saint Nino. Together, these anniversaries draw attention towards Asia Minor and the Caucasus, towards communities whose Christian belonging cannot be understood solely through the later division between Rome and Constantinople. They also reopen the question of faith’s relationship with power: how does a confession sustained across seventeen centuries retain the humility of those who first received and transmitted it?
This Shabbat, October 17, 2026, Jewish communities read Parashat Noach. Beside the Caucasian world, the neighbouring Armenian highlands evoke the biblical account of the ark coming to rest upon the “mountains of Ararat.” The association brings the reflection back to life carried through vulnerability. Within the ark, survival depends on shelter, coexistence and care for living creatures. After the flood, the covenant embraces humanity and every living creature. Before the later boundaries of empires and Churches, the narrative places breathing life within a shared responsibility. Its resonance here is quiet but profound: what must be carried through upheaval so that life can begin again?
Moreover, the Catholic communion itself includes the Latin Church and Eastern Catholic Churches with distinct traditions. Eastern Christianity, in turn, extends across Byzantine Orthodox, Ancient Oriental Orthodox and East Syriac histories, among others. These families cannot be fitted neatly into two institutional compartments. From an Orthodox perspective, communion must preserve the integrity of living Churches and their received faith. The question of unity therefore reaches beyond agreement between prominent centres. It concerns how communities recognize and receive one another without requiring their histories to disappear.
For decades, another image has accompanied this reflection. I use to call it the thymus of the Church. Situated behind the breastbone, between the lungs, the thymus participates in the maturation of T lymphocytes. These cells subsequently enter circulation and other lymphatic organs, contributing to the body’s defences. The thymus is particularly important early in life and becomes smaller with age. Its formative importance is far greater than its visibility in everyday awareness.
The ancient Semitic Christian communities can be approached through this image. Aramaic and Syriac traditions carry forms of prayer, scriptural interpretation and worship that belong deeply to Christianity’s formation. “Semitic,” “Syriac” and “pre-Chalcedonian” describe different, intersecting realities. Their significance nevertheless presses upon the larger question: what happens when the Church remembers its grand institutional divisions more readily than the formative communities whose voices continue within its prayer?
These communities are alive. Their inheritance is spoken, sung, taught to children and carried into migration. It belongs to households as well as sanctuaries. A liturgical language preserves ways of hearing a biblical sentence, associating words, addressing God and remembering the living and the dead.
The thymus metaphor also directs attention towards formation rather than prestige. An organ’s importance does not depend on its capacity to occupy the foreground. Likewise, a Church’s contribution cannot be measured solely by its membership, wealth, diplomatic access or architectural monuments. Small communities may sustain a knowledge of prayer and belonging that larger institutions need. They possess no automatic innocence, and their histories include conflict. Their importance lies in the life entrusted to them and the responsibility of transmitting it.
This brings the reflection close to Christendom’s Jewish beginnings, while preserving the distinction between living Judaism and Christian traditions formed in Semitic languages. Hebrew and Aramaic do not simply provide an antique background for later Christian speech. They lead back towards worlds of interpretation, argument, blessing and communal obligation. Christianity’s attention to these worlds must include respect for Jewish life continuing in its own right.
The language of immunity needs similar care. It can easily encourage the fantasy of a religious community protected by exclusion. Here, the thymus suggests the formation of capacities needed to live faithfully. Identity develops through learning, transmission and discernment. It enables encounter without dissolution.
Against this background, the bodily vulnerability of successive popes acquires its particular resonance. The Western lung, to retain John Paul II’s image, is carried by human beings who need breath, treatment and rest. No office abolishes dependence. The highest visibility can coexist with the most ordinary physical need. A pontificate unfolds through decisions and journeys, but also through a body that must be cared for. That dependence places authority within the same human condition as those whom it addresses.
This is where the correspondence between Francis and Leo can suggest a deep transformation, reaching from the uppermost aspirations to the foundations. The suggestion remains open: what might the Churches relinquish in order to serve more freely? What habits of domination have become confused with fidelity? How much energy is spent maintaining the appearance of strength? Illness answers none of these questions on its own. It can, however, interrupt the assurance with which institutions imagine themselves sufficient.
The wider world continually offers wealth, success, conquest and military power as evidence of importance. Religious communities inhabit that world and can adopt its measures. Humility then becomes ceremonial language while competition governs conduct. The fragile body disturbs this arrangement. It asks for attention that cannot be postponed until victory. A hospital room, a threatened parish and a displaced family each place a concrete life before the abstractions through which power explains itself.
The ancient Churches of the Middle East should not have to earn attention through suffering. Their worship, thought and ordinary communal life already belong to humanity’s religious inheritance. It also means receiving what they teach. Unity becomes substantial when communities make room for one another’s gifts and needs, including those whose voices carry little political weight.
Perhaps this is where “God’s finger” may be sensed: in an unexpected correspondence that draws attention towards what has been overlooked. Two pontificates, two wounded portions of the right lung, and between the lungs an unobtrusive organ of formation. The image remains an invitation.
What formative sources must the Churches keep alive if their hoped-for unity is to have depth? The answer begins wherever breath is received with gratitude, authority accepts dependence, and an ancient voice is given time to speak.