Vatican says Pope Francis is alert and well, a day after surgery.

Vatican spokesman; Matteo Bruni said on Monday that the supreme head of the Roman Catholic Church; Pope Francis is alert and well. This good news comes a day after Pope Francis underwent a three-hour surgery where half of his colon was removed and he is expected to stay in Rome’s Gemelli Polyclinic, a Catholic hospital, for about seven days.

Matteo Bruni also said that Pope Francis is “in good condition, alert and breathing on his own ”.

The brief medical bulletin contained the first details the Vatican released, coming more than 12 hours after the end of Sunday’s surgery. The procedure was necessitated by what the Holy See said was a diverticular stenosis, or narrowing the pope’s sigmoid portion of the large intestine.

Pope Francis was spending his first morning convalescing on Monday in a Rome hospital following intestinal surgery under general anesthesia and reportedly doing well.

The Vatican has given scant details about the operation Sunday evening in Gemelli Polyclinic, a major Catholic hospital in the Italian capital, although it did say he responded “well” to the surgery.

An Italian cardinal told reporters he had been informed that the 84-year-old pope was doing well.

“Our prayer and our closeness are very great,” Cardinal Enrico Feroci said at Rome’s airport where he was catching a flight. The Italian news agency ANSA quoted him as saying that he had heard earlier in the morning from another cardinal, Angelo De Donatis, “and he told me that the pope is well.” De Donatis is the vicar of the Rome diocese.

Francis is staying in special, 10th floor suite that the hospital keeps available for use by a pontiff, after Pope John Paul II stayed there several times for various medical problems.

The pontiff is expected to be hospitalized for several days.

When the Vatican announced on Sunday afternoon that Francis had been admitted to hospital for a planned operation, it said that he needed surgery because he had developed a diverticular stenosis, or narrowing, of the sigmoid portion of the large intestine.

Without citing sources, Rome daily Il Messaggero reported that “complications” arose during the surgery. Without specifying what happened, the newspaper said that the surgeons, after starting to operate via laparoscopy, ended up having to do incisions.

We wish Pope Francis a speedy recovery.