Pope Leo XIV Comes Home to Peru, Calling the Nation Where He Served for Decades His 'Homeland'

Pope Leo XIV arrived in Lima on Wednesday evening and told Peru what millions of its people had hoped to hear: he had come home. Speaking to President Keiko Fujimori and the nation's leaders on the first night of the final leg of his South American journey, the pontiff said he could tell them, "with deep gratitude, that I am also returning to my homeland," drawing applause, CBS News reported.

For the first pope to hold Peruvian citizenship, the words carried the weight of a life story. Leo, born Robert Francis Prevost, spent more than two decades in Peru as a missionary priest and later as a bishop, and he has said it was in Peru that he learned what it means to be a shepherd. He told officials that much of this land has stayed with him and that much of his own story belongs to Peruvians as well.

Leo flew to Peru on a charter plane from Argentina, where the second leg of his trip ended with an emotional send-off. Argentine President Javier Milei was brought to tears as the pope prepared to board, and Milei reportedly asked the Holy Father to pray for him, Breitbart reported. The Argentina visit had drawn more than 2.5 million people to an outdoor Mass in Buenos Aires, according to the same report.

In Peru, the welcome was larger still. The Vatican's program called for his arrival at the Callao Air Base, followed by a welcome ceremony at the Government Palace, a visit with the president and an address to authorities, civil society and diplomats at the Gran Teatro Nacional. Fujimori greeted him at the foot of the airplane stairs, the Spanish news agency EFE reported.

The Vatican estimated that about 3 million people lined the motorcade route, and some broke through security to run after the popemobile, CBS News reported. EFE described an unbroken crowd along a route of more than 10 kilometers through central Lima. In the palace courtyard, the pope sang Peru's national anthem alongside Fujimori and a children's choir.

A 46-foot statue of the pope was unveiled in the port of El Callao, and Lima coffee shops served cappuccinos topped with his image. An 85-year-old woman in the crowd told reporters that Peruvians love him because he worked among them and knows their sufferings. That night, the pope greeted the faithful from the balcony of the apostolic nunciature and gave them his blessing.

In his address to the nation's leaders, Leo spoke about public life in moral terms. To love a people, he said, is to want everyone in it to be able to live with dignity, and he urged officials to cultivate honesty, uprightness and a willingness to meet one another, EFE reported. He praised public service as an admirable way of caring for the good of others and said that work must begin by listening to people.

Fujimori, who won the presidency this year on her fourth attempt, told the pope that Peru needs to heal its wounds and called for national reconciliation. CBS News noted that the pope's stop in the Amazon will honor Indigenous communities whose lands are affected by illegal gold mining and coca cultivation.

Church leaders in Peru have framed the visit as a chance to begin healing. Cardinal Pedro Barreto Jimeno, the retired archbishop of Huancayo, said before the trip that the pope would find a battered country short on hope, and he expressed confidence that Leo's presence would help Peruvians build a dialogue that is "disarmed and disarming," one that respects human dignity and seeks the common good, he told Religion Digital, OSV News reported.

The road to this homecoming began in 1985, when the young Augustinian was sent to his order's mission in Chulucanas, in the northern region of Piura, according to his official Vatican biography. Soon after arriving, he was hospitalized with typhoid fever, OSV News reported, and he later recalled praying that God would either make him better or take him.

In 1988, he joined the mission in Trujillo, where for about a decade he directed the formation of Augustinian candidates, served as prior of the community, worked as judicial vicar of the archdiocese and taught canon law, patristics and moral theology at the major seminary of San Carlos y San Marcelo. For more than 10 years, he also cared for a parish in a poor suburb of Trujillo.

He was elected prior general of the Augustinians in 2001 and served the worldwide order from Rome until 2013. In 2014, Pope Francis sent him back to Peru. He was named apostolic administrator of the Diocese of Chiclayo on Nov. 3, 2014, ordained a bishop in Chiclayo's Cathedral of Saint Mary that December and appointed bishop of Chiclayo on Sept. 26, 2015. He became a Peruvian citizen in 2015, a bond he said this week began long before that. In 2018 the country's bishops elected him second vice president of their conference, and in 2020 he also took on the Diocese of Callao as apostolic administrator.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, he launched a Caritas Chiclayo campaign called "Oxygen of Hope" that funded two oxygen plants, OSV News reported. A lay leader in Chiclayo recalled that the bishop knew and trusted the laypeople who served alongside him. In January 2023, he was called to Rome to lead the Dicastery for Bishops.

On Thursday in Lima, the Holy See's program has Leo meeting with Peru's bishops, praying with clergy, religious and seminarians in the city's cathedral basilica, speaking on the challenges and hopes of the Peruvian people from the square in front of the cathedral and leading an evening prayer vigil with young people at the National Stadium.

On Friday he flies to Chiclayo, the diocese he led, to celebrate Mass in an open field near the Pampas de Pimentel, make a private visit to a chapel dedicated to St. Óscar Romero, and meet with clergy and a Catholic university community before supper with the diocese's priests. On Saturday he will preside at the rite of coronation of the Immaculate Virgin in Chiclayo's Cathedral of Saint Mary, the same cathedral where he was ordained a bishop, then travel by helicopter to Santa Cruz de Succhabamba for Mass. That evening he is to lead a prayer service closing the Jubilee Year of St. Turibius of Mogrovejo at the saint's shrine, which CBS News placed in Zaña, a center of Afro-Peruvian culture.

Sunday is the busiest day: an early flight to Cusco for a meeting with the faithful and representatives of popular devotion at the Saqsaywaman archaeological park and the Angelus in front of the city's cathedral, then a flight into the Amazon to meet with missionaries and representatives of Amazonian peoples in Pucallpa and to celebrate Mass there before returning to Lima. Cusco's main square is where the Indigenous leader Túpac Amaru II was killed in 1781.

On Monday, Leo is scheduled to visit a shelter for abandoned elderly people run by the Little Sisters, celebrate Mass at the Las Palmas Air Base and depart from Callao in the early afternoon, arriving in Rome on Tuesday morning. The published program does not include a stop in Trujillo, where he spent most of the 1990s.

For Peru's Catholics, this is less a state visit than the return of a pastor who knew their parishes and their poverty. Boston College sociologist Gustavo Morello called the trip a return to the pope's origins, CBS News reported. OSV News reported that the Vatican plans for the pope to meet with victims of abuse during the visit, news that advocates received with cautious optimism even as survivors voiced concern about the Church's slow progress in removing the Sodalitium Christianae Vitae movement from parishes.

The faithful who chased the popemobile through Lima were not cheering for a celebrity. They were welcoming a man who prayed through typhoid fever in their country, taught their seminarians, helped bring oxygen to their sick during a pandemic and served their parishes for decades. For American Catholics, too, there is something moving in watching the first pope from the United States received as a son by another nation, a reminder that the family of the Church crosses every border. On Sunday he will pray the Angelus beneath the Andes. On Monday he will say goodbye. For six days, Peru has its shepherd back.