MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay — Pope Leo XIV landed in Uruguay’s capital Friday, the first stop in a 12-day Latin America trip that also includes stops in Argentina and Peru. It is set to be his breakout moment — with predictions of the largest, most effusive crowds of his papacy — and a historic homecoming for the Chicago-born pontiff who is a citizen of both the United States and Peru, which he adopted as a second home after working there for two decades.
That may still be how the trip plays out. Yet after his recent lung cancer operation the travel is now also a test of his stamina, and the momentum of a still-nascent papacy.
On board the papal flight to Uruguay, Leo appeared robust, telling journalists he felt even better than he looked. He hadn’t yet restarted his regular tennis matches, he said, but hoped he would soon. He spoke of his cancer diagnosis as giving him a new “sense of commitment,” and noted that his first speech of the trip would focus on “how health care should be a right of all.”
The trip’s stakes are high, with more than 40 percent of the globe’s 1.4 billion Catholics living in Latin America at a time when the world’s largest Christian faith is being challenged there as never before by secularism, competition from evangelical faiths, deep political polarization and the legacy of abuse by clerics.
Leo’s task is to reignite a faith on the defensive in its stronghold. In Argentina and Peru, a pope who has not been afraid to delve into politics will find himself in a delicate dance with rightist leaders aligned with President Donald Trump, who has sharply criticized Leo.
“He is by nature a calm and thoughtful person, and he is not going to look for an open confrontation, but I think he will be clear about the church’s approach toward human dignity,” said the Rev. John Lydon, director of Villanova’s Mother Cabrini Institute on Immigration, who lived with Leo when they were both missionaries in Peru in the 1990s.
The leaders “know that he is more popular than they are, and it would be a losing political proposition” to challenge Leo, he said. “The pope is a moral voice. They will clap and nod and say it’s a great message, but I don’t know they will be converted.”
During the trip, Leo will honor his Argentinian-born predecessor, Francis, the first Latin American pope, who never returned to his homeland after taking the throne of St. Peter. Leo also will be doing his own legacy building, visiting slums, sacred shrines and disability centers, holding massive outdoor Masses and reveling in his return to Chiclayo, his beloved former diocese in Peru.
He will give no fewer than 40 addresses — all of them in his fluent Spanish.
“He has an immense desire to make this trip,” said Rodrigo Guerra López, secretary of the Vatican’s Pontifical Commission for Latin America. “Will it be the moment when the pope becomes a rock star? I think it will be the moment when the pope, as has happened with several popes, delves into the meaning of what it means to be pope at the beginning of the 21st century.”
He continued, “as he showed us on his trips to France and Spain, he can [draw large crowds] in very secularized societies. … Now, there is the potential that this trip could be even greater than anything we have seen in Europe.”
Vatican gatekeepers are taking a “nothing-to-see-here” approach to his recent cancer operation. The pope is recovered and healthy, they say, following a successful procedure. Medical attention will be close at hand if needed, but they insist that few special precautions are being taken.
“I know some people were doubtful about this trip taking place,” Leo said aboard the plane. He said that he’d always been confident it would go forward and that he thinks he’s “in pretty good shape.”
Some doctors who are not treating the pope, however, remain surprised that he is undertaking such a hectic and distant journey just three weeks after his operation, with some questioning the decision to follow through with a higher-risk, if short, side trip to Cusco, Peru, where even physically fit visitors can experience breathing distress from the high altitude.
“Even in the best-case scenario, it is already complicated, because when you go to high altitudes, you need to have a certain functional capacity,” said Raffaele Angelo Madaio, an oncologist at Rome’s Israelite Hospital who is not involved in the pope’s care. “We all experience respiratory issues due to oxygen concentration; imagine doing so with one less lobe.”
Popes, however, tend to push themselves, often to their physical detriment. Francis was widely seen to have hindered his own recovery from a serious bout with pneumonia shortly before his death by insisting on returning to work. Leo’s trip will be parsed for any sign of physical change in an otherwise healthy 71-year-old — and could determine whether he is labeled with the same adjective: stubborn.
Leo sought to avoid a delay in part, insiders say, because of the extensive planning already underway. Any postponement could have kicked back the trip by months.
The fact that Leo opted not to postpone also suggests a pope eager to show the world that his cancer scare hasn’t slowed him down.
Delaying “would have sent a message of a diminished papacy potentially weakened by this health crisis. That’s the conclusion some have drawn from this,” said Massimo Faggioli, a theologian at Villanova University, the pope’s alma mater.
But “as we have seen in these last few days in his various appearances, he seems in very good spirits, nothing has changed compared to one month ago. And this is not any trip. He is coming home,” Faggioli said.
Some Vatican officials have been candid about the stakes of the pope’s recent diagnosis.
“The fact that he has fallen ill with, in many ways, one of the most common illnesses of our age means that he is a poor mortal like the rest of us,” Archbishop Paul Gallagher, a senior official in the Vatican’s Secretariate of State, told reporters last week in Rome. “And I think that that is going to change how we see him and possibly how he sees himself as well.”
Even with a successful surgery, he said, the diagnosis is “a bit of a game changer.”
Each segment of the trip is set to bring a different focus.
In Uruguay, where less than half of the population identifies as Catholic, the faith has been diminished less by poaching from evangelical denominations — as has happened in neighboring Brazil — and more by the spread of secularism. Leo will seek out the devout in one of the country’s harshest slums.
In Argentina, he will walk in Francis’s footsteps in cosmopolitan Buenos Aires, making a point of visiting a center for the disabled — a move seen by some as an overt statement against the social benefits cuts made under President Javier Milei.
Milei had described Leo’s predecessor as an “imbecile,” “a communist” and a representative of the Devil. He softened his tone in recent years, but Leo’s trip is still seen as an uncomfortable reminder of former spats.
In Peru, where Leo spent 20 years as a missionary and bishop and became a citizen in 2015, he will be welcomed by President Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of the late president Alberto Fujimori. Leo, as an Augustinian missionary in the 1990s, joined protests against the human rights abuses of the elder Fujimori’s era, describing them as recently as 2017 as “great injustices.”
An outpouring of millions is expected for Leo, a man Peruvians view as one of their own. Churches are restoring their facades, and towns are lining streets with thousands of Vatican flags, as Leo plans to crisscross the country, from Lima, the capital, to the high Andes and the low Amazon basin.
The most anticipated event is Leo’s return to Chiclayo, where he will hold a sprawling outdoor Mass on Nov. 13. In Peru as well as Argentina, many anticipate crowds larger than his record to date: 1.2 million on the streets of Madrid in June.
“You will see [Leo] as you saw him in Spain, giving away his heart and speaking in a language that is true to him,” Vatican spokeswoman Maria Montserrat Alvarado told reporters this week. “You will see that again, but in a totally different way because he knows these streets.”
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