Pope Leo opens 12-day Latin America tour three weeks after cancer surgery
Seven Lights
Pope Leo XIV begins a 12-day tour of Latin America on Friday with a landing in Uruguay, the first stop of a journey across South America that the 71-year-old pontiff undertook just three weeks after surgery for lung cancer.
The itinerary takes in Uruguay, Argentina and Peru and covers thousands of miles from the Amazon to the Andes, with multiple long-haul and local flights. Uruguay, where the number of Catholics has fallen steeply in recent years, receives its first papal visit in four decades. Peru carries particular weight: Leo served there as a priest for many years, and the Vatican has cast that leg of the trip as a homecoming.
The Vatican said no extraordinary health measures were being taken. It described the pope as “a 71-year-old who has undergone an operation” rather than someone with a “permanent medical condition,” and said the cancer had not spread. A spokeswoman at a briefing in Rome said Leo had “fantastic stamina” and was “extremely enthusiastic” about a schedule he had “personally confirmed… with no changes.”
Professor Massimo Faggioli of Villanova University read the journey as a statement: “The Vatican’s message with this trip is, ’that was a short episode and now we’re back on track.'”
In all three countries the pope is scheduled to meet survivors of clerical sexual abuse, an issue that clouded his predecessor’s 2018 visit to Chile and Peru. The tour is also being watched for what it may do to the church’s standing with disenchanted young Catholics in a region that remains the world’s most heavily Catholic but where Protestant and non-religious populations keep growing.
The tour opens days after Leo presided Friday in St. Peter’s Basilica over the annual memorial Mass for cardinals and bishops who died during the year, his first public act since the operation in a schedule he chose to keep intact.