- The Pope returning from where he was sent
- The return of a continent forgotten by papal geography
- What this return says about the Church in Latin America today
- A continent that remains the world's largest Catholic reservoir
- Pucallpa's Amazon, a choice that is not neutral
- Lectio divina
- ✝ Biblical references
Some journeys feel like visits, and others like homecomings. On August 5th, the Holy See confirmed what many had suspected since Robert Francis Prevost's election as Leo XIV: the Pope will undertake an apostolic journey to Uruguay, Argentina, and Peru from November 6th to 17th. This is not simply another diplomatic trip on the papal agenda. It is a man returning to the lands where he served for nearly twenty years as a missionary priest, then as Bishop of Chiclayo for eight years, before Rome called him to other responsibilities. This journey carries a symbolic weight that neither the Argentina of John Paul II nor that of Francis had ever experienced in this way: a Pope who is not discovering a continent, but returning to it.
What immediately strikes one is the deliberate disproportion of the itinerary. Three days in Uruguay, three days in Argentina, and seven full days in Peru. This imbalance is not a matter of protocol; it is a silent confession. Leo XIV chose to dedicate more than half his time to the country where he was shaped as a pastor, where he learned the Spanish of the Andes as well as that of Lima, and where he obtained Peruvian citizenship in 2015. This choice, even before the first speech delivered on the tarmac in Montevideo, outlines an implicit theology of return, fidelity, and rootedness, which will permeate all the reflection that follows.
The Pope returning from where he was sent
Chiclayo, the matrix of a ministry
One must imagine what it means for a bishop, now Pope, to cross the threshold of his former diocese once again. Chiclayo is not just another ceremonial stop: it is the city where, from the end of 2014 until his departure for Rome in 2023, the man then known as Monsignor Roberto wove, stone by stone, a pastoral fabric that the inhabitants still describe today with undiminished fervor. Nine years of daily presence among a population of over six hundred thousand, a city where, according to testimonies gathered there, the Catholic faith is lived out in devotion and fills the churches every day of the week, men and women, young and old alike. It is there that the future Pope learned what it truly means to be a pastor who goes to the peripheries rather than an administrator who waits for others to come to him.
This experience is not insignificant in the development of his magisterium. It sheds a particular light on a passage from the prophet Ezekiel too often reduced to a generic pastoral image: «I will raise up over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he will tend them. He will tend them and be their shepherd» (Ezekiel 34:23). This verse does not merely announce a distant messianic figure; it describes a way of exercising authority measured by physical proximity to the flock, by the ability to know each sheep by name, each quarter by its face. Leo XIV, by choosing to return first and foremost to the places where he had exercised this kind of concrete responsibility, illustrates in practice what the biblical text promises: a shepherd who does not govern from a distance, but who physically returns to check on the state of the flock he left behind.
The Peruvian program, with its four stops—Lima, Chiclayo, Cusco, and Pucallpa—deliberately presents a comprehensive overview of the country: the political capital, the diocese of pastoral origin, the Andean highlands, and the Amazon rainforest. This itinerary is not merely touristic or ceremonial; it reflects a desire to visit the three Perus that coexist uneasily—the urbanized coast, the indigenous mountains, and the Amazon, largely ignored by the major centers of power. The Pope is familiar with this divide, having experienced it firsthand, as he himself was sent, while already Bishop of Chiclayo, to resolve difficulties in a diocese near Lima. This experience as a mediator between the peripheries and the center finds, in this journey, a form of continuity and fulfillment.
Cusco and the memory of a wounded evangelization
The Cusco stop, at an altitude of over 3,400 meters, deserves special attention because it directly touches upon one of the oldest and most sensitive wounds in the Church's missionary history in Latin America. The Cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption of Cusco, founded in 1559 under the impetus of Viceroy Andrés Hurtado de Mendoza and Spanish missionaries, rises on the very foundations of the palace of the last great Inca ruler, Huayna Capac. This place concentrates, in its very stone, all the ambiguity of the first Andean evangelization: sincere missionary zeal on the one hand, colonial violence on the other—two realities that the contemporary Church can no longer artificially separate when it reinterprets its own past.
That Leo XIV chose to visit this very place, he who had spent twenty years evangelizing in this same Andean country, invites us to reread a lesser-known passage from the Apostle Paul, written from his own perspective as a man on a mission in a world foreign to him: «I have become all things to all people, so that by all possible means I might save some» (1 Corinthians 9:22). This verse, often quoted in its shortest form, takes on a particular resonance in its full context: Paul describes a complete adaptation of his way of being, not out of calculation, but out of genuine love for those he was evangelizing. This is precisely what the inhabitants of Chiclayo recount of their former bishop: his ability to make himself understood in both languages of the region, to eat what the poor families ate, and to never behave like a passing stranger. The evangelization that heals the wounds of history is not that which imposes from the outside, but that which draws near to the point of identification.
The return of a continent forgotten by papal geography
Forty years of silence in Argentina and Uruguay
The most striking aspect of this trip, and the one that should command attention above all else, is this almost unbelievable fact: it will be the first papal visit to Argentina and Uruguay in nearly forty years. John Paul II visited Uruguay twice, in 1987 and 1988, and this is the last papal visit to that country before the anticipated arrival of Leo XIV. As for Argentina, the irony of history is staggering: the country that gave birth to Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who became Pope Francis, has never received a visit from its own son after he became pontiff. Francis, despite twelve years as pontiff, has never returned to his native land.
This silence of almost four decades can be explained by a combination of political, ecclesiastical, and personal circumstances specific to each pontificate, but it left a void that, in the eyes of many Argentinian and Uruguayan faithful, came to resemble a form of oblivion. It is this void that Leo XIV has now filled, not by rectifying a past error, but simply by picking up a thread that Providence had let slip. There is something in this gesture that recalls the words of the prophet Isaiah addressed to a people who believed themselves abandoned: «Zion said, «The Lord has forsaken me, my Lord has forgotten me.» Can a mother forget her nursing child, or have no compassion on the child of her womb?» (Isaiah 49:14-15). This text, rarely invoked outside its usual liturgical framework, says exactly what the Argentinian and Uruguayan episcopates expressed when welcoming the announcement of the trip with unanimous fervor: the feeling of a lack finally filled, the certainty that the universal Church had not relegated them to the background of its geography.
The Uruguayan itinerary, with its stops in Montevideo, Paysandú, and Florida, as well as the Argentinian leg through Buenos Aires, Córdoba, and the Marian shrine of Luján, implicitly acknowledges the Catholic vitality of these territories, too often reduced, in external representations, to the increasing secularization of their major cities. By choosing to stop in Florida, a small town eighty kilometers north of Montevideo, and in Paysandú, on the banks of the river that separates Uruguay from Argentina, the Pope signals that he is not only coming to honor the capitals and their ecclesiastical elites, but also the provincial peripheries, remaining faithful in this to a pastoral approach he shares with his immediate predecessor.
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Luján, the Virgin who no longer moves
The Argentinian section of the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Luján deserves special attention, for its history embodies a Marian theology of singular power. According to the tradition established since 1630, a small statue of the Immaculate Conception, transported by an ox-drawn cart, refused to go beyond a certain point on the banks of the Luján River. The inhabitants of this then-desert region saw this as a sign of divine will to remain there, and built a chapel, then an oratory, then a sanctuary, culminating in the current basilica, completed in 1937 and canonically consecrated in 1887 by Pope Leo XIII.
This story, which might be dismissed as mere pious folklore, actually reveals something profound about the theology of the Incarnation as applied to Latin American popular piety: God, through his Mother, chooses a specific place, rejects the abstraction of a devotion without roots, and establishes himself permanently amidst a concrete people, with their roads, rivers, and seasons. Our Lady of Luján, declared patron saint of Argentina and also venerated in Uruguay and Paraguay, has become, over generations, the place where the great figures of Argentine independence, Manuel Belgrano and José de San Martín foremost among them, came to pray before their decisive campaigns. That Leo XIV chose to stop there during his Argentine visit, rather than limiting himself to official meetings in the capital, reveals a keen awareness of the importance of popular piety as a fully-fledged theological space, a conviction he explicitly shared with the pastoral legacy of his Argentine predecessor.
What this return says about the Church in Latin America today
A continent that remains the world's largest Catholic reservoir
It would be reductive to read this journey solely from the biographical perspective of Leo XIV's personal path. It must be placed within a demographic and spiritual reality too often overlooked from a European perspective: Latin America remains, despite waves of secularization and the rise of evangelical movements, the continent with the largest proportion of Catholics in the world. The choice of the three countries visited is not neutral in this regard. Uruguay is historically one of the most secularized countries on the subcontinent, where the Church has had to learn to bear witness to the faith in a resolutely secular public sphere since the beginning of the twentieth century. Argentina, the land of Peronism and repeated economic tensions, maintains a vigorous popular piety despite the crisis in vocations. Finally, Peru combines rapid urban modernity in Lima with Andean and Amazonian traditions where Catholicism is intimately intertwined with indigenous cultures.
By traversing these three vastly different realities in twelve days, Leo XIV composed a kind of deliberate fresco of Latin American Catholic diversity, rejecting the idea of a homogeneous continent that could be visited only once. This attention to the plurality of ecclesial experiences echoes an intuition shared by Cardinal Pedro Barreto Jimeno, a Peruvian figure deeply involved in Amazonian issues, for whom the future of the Latin American Church hinges precisely on its capacity to hold together the urban, Andean, and Amazonian peripheries without ever sacrificing one to the other.
Pucallpa's Amazon, a choice that is not neutral
The final stop in Pucallpa, a Peruvian Amazonian city where Leo XIV will conclude his journey on November 17, should not be interpreted as a mere geographical highlight. It is a direct continuation of the concerns expressed by the Synod on the Amazon held in Rome in 2019, in which the then Bishop of Chiclayo actively participated as someone with firsthand knowledge of the realities of the Peruvian Amazon. Concluding such a symbolically charged journey with a passage deep into the rainforest, rather than a triumphant return to a major capital, is in itself a pastoral message: the most remote peripheries are not secondary extensions of the Church's mission, but rather its very core.
This way of concluding the journey resonates with a passage from the Book of Acts, less frequently highlighted than other missionary verses, where Paul and his companions, prevented by the Spirit from taking certain directions, ultimately allow themselves to be led to unexpected lands: «They passed through Mysia and went down to Troas. During the night Paul had a vision: a Macedonian man stood and begged him, «Come over to Macedonia and help us»» (Acts 16:8-9). This text illustrates a missionary dynamic that does not follow the logic of large cities and major centers of power, but rather that of a call from the margins. By ending his Latin American journey not in Buenos Aires or even Lima, but in the heart of the Peruvian Amazon, Leo XIV concretely demonstrates this same logic: the last words of such an anticipated journey are not spoken in front of the cameras of capitals, but in the midst of those whom global economic geography continues to marginalize.
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«I will raise up over them one shepherd, my servant David, who will feed them. He will feed them and be their shepherd.» (Ezekiel 34:23)
Perhaps you, too, carry the memory of a place you left without ever truly leaving it. Is there, in your own life, a land, a community, a face to which you feel you should return? What still prevents you from making that journey back? The shepherd Ezekiel speaks of doesn't rule from a distant throne: he knows the scent of the sheepfold he left behind. And you, what sheepfold still awaits your return?
Lord, you who never forget the flock you have entrusted to your shepherds, teach me the faithfulness of return. I think of those I left without truly leaving them, of those inner landscapes left fallow. Grant me the memory of the shepherd who recognizes each sheep. Make me someone who returns, never someone who abandons. May my steps one day retrace the path of those I have loved. Keep alive within me the promise of Ezekiel.
A red dirt road under the Andes, and in the distance, a silhouette returning to the sheepfold she never really left.
✝ Biblical references
4 passages · 4 books
If I do not have love, I am nothing. (1 Corinthians 13:2)
Unity of the Church, ethical problems and a hymn to charity for the Corinthian community.
→ Explore the Codex 1 Corinthians- An Oklahoma farmer becomes a saint: what American cinema reveals about missionary sainthood
- Leo XIV and the love that moves the sun: the papacy in rhythm with the world
- When Trégor receives its pastors from Africa: a silent globalization of the Church in France
- In the heart of the Sahel, a mission without conquest: the Church's silent strategy
You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you… you will be my witnesses. (Acts 1:8)
The birth and expansion of the Church from Jerusalem to Rome under the action of the Spirit.
→ Explore the Codex Acts of the Apostles
I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you. (Ezekiel 36:26)
Apocalyptic visions, oracles of judgment, and the promise of the restoration of Israel.
→ Explore the Ezekiel Codex- Leo XIV and the gesture of Saint Ignatius of Antioch: when Rome learned to sing with one voice with the East
- California: When the Church demands that the law protect the souls of children before algorithms devour them
- Moscow without a pastor: what Bishop Gallagher's mass reveals about a Church awaiting its shepherd
- When an opposition leader leaves the Vatican transformed
He has given us a child, a son has been given to us. (Isaiah 9:5)
The great prophet of salvation: judgment, consolation and announcement of the Suffering Servant.
→ Explore the Isaiah Codex- I will make you a light for the nations (Isaiah 49:1-6)
- I will make you a light for the nations, that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth (Isaiah 49:1-6)
- I have appointed you to be the covenant of the people, to restore the land (Isaiah 49:8-15)
- I will make you a light for the nations, that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth (Isaiah 49:3, 5-6)
- Nepal: When water sweeps everything away, the Church remains standing
- When the judgment of one man decides a life: Massachusetts law and the collapse of a boundary
- Guadeloupe: When the archipelago buries its dead, the Church chooses to bury fear
- France is burning: what the episcopate is really asking of us
🌍 3 countries involved
With over 77,130 baptized Catholics, Argentina remains one of the major Catholic countries in South America, even though regular church attendance has declined significantly. Evangelization began in the 16th century with the arrival…
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With over 76,130 Catholics, Peru is a country deeply marked by the Catholic faith, blending colonial tradition with vibrant Andean spiritualities. Evangelization began in the 16th century with the Dominicans and the Franks…
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The most secularized country in Latin America, Uruguay today has approximately 42,130 baptized Catholics, but very low regular church attendance. Evangelization began in the 17th century with the Franciscans and Dominicans…
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