Pope Francis is recovering in hospital having undergone a three-hour operation without complications to repair a hernia, the Vatican has said. "He even joked with me about when we would do the third operation," said Dr Sergio Alfieri, the chief surgeon at Rome's Gemelli hospital – who also carried out a first abdominal operation on the pontiff in 2021. The surgeon said that Francis, 86, had reacted well to general anaesthesia and that he expected the pontiff to spend around a week in hospital.