The Vatican announced on Wednesday that Pope Leo XIV would make a 10-day trip to Africa in April, traveling to Algeria, Angola, Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea, less than a year after he was elected to the papacy.
The trip to Africa so early in Leo’s tenure appeared to signal the importance of a continent where Roman Catholicism is growing faster than anywhere else. The number of Catholics grew by more than 15 million worldwide from mid-2022 to mid-2023, more than half of them in Africa, according to the most recent statistics published by the Vatican. The continent also produces more trainee priests than any other, though Africans are underrepresented in the church’s senior leadership.
Leo’s predecessor, Pope Francis, increased the number of African cardinals but did not visit the continent until he had been in office for more than two years.
Though it will be Leo’s first trip to Africa as pope, he visited the continent regularly as leader of the Augustinian order from 2001 to 2013 and also during the two years in which he headed a department at the Vatican that oversees the appointment of bishops. The Augustinian order traces its roots to the teachings of St. Augustine, who was born in the fourth century in what is now Algeria.
During a visit to Tanzania in 2003, Leo made a 470-mile trip in a car “which he drove himself,” Bishop Stephano Musomba, a Tanzanian cleric, said in an interview with a local newspaper last May. Leo’s love of long-distance driving is well documented.
In November, on his first international trip since he was elected as pope, Leo traveled to Turkey and Lebanon, where he tried to strengthen ties with Islamic leaders and with the Orthodox church. On the return flight to Rome, Leo was asked about future trips and he expressed his desire to travel to Africa, and specifically “to Algeria to visit the places of St. Augustine, but also in order to continue the conversation of dialogue, of building bridges between the Christian world and the Muslim world.”
Nearly a fifth of all Roman Catholics are Africans, a proportion that is not reflected in the church’s hierarchy. There are currently 245 cardinals, about half of whom are under 80 and can therefore vote in a conclave to choose a pope. Africa has 29 cardinals, roughly half of them under 80. Nearly two-thirds were appointed by Pope Francis, who made the church leadership more geographically diverse.
Roughly 280 million people, about a fifth of Africa’s population, are Roman Catholic.
Pope Paul VI was the first pope to visit Africa, traveling to Uganda in 1969. His successor, John Paul II, visited the continent 13 times from 1980 to 2000. Benedict XVI traveled to Africa twice during his papacy, and Francis, who died last year, went four times from 2015 to 2023. When Francis visited the Democratic Republic of Congo during his last trip to the continent, he sought to encourage peace in an overwhelmingly Christian country that has known little of it.
The Vatican said that, in Algeria, Leo would spend April 13-15 in Algiers and Annaba, which stands on the site of Hippo, the ancient city where St. Augustine lived. In Cameroon, he will travel to Yaoundé, Bamenda and Douala from April 15-18, before visiting Luanda, Muxima and Saurimo in Angola from April 18-21. The final stops are in Equatorial Guinea, where Leo will visit Malabo, Mongomo and Bata from April 21-23.
Leo will also make a one-day trip to the principality of Monaco on March 28, and he will go to Spain in June for a six-day visit, the Vatican said.
Elisabetta Povoledo is a Times reporter based in Rome, covering Italy, the Vatican and the culture of the region. She has been a journalist for 35 years.
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