CHICLAYO, Peru — A vast crowd gathered outside this northern Peruvian city early on Friday for the centerpiece event of Pope Leo’s 12-day South America tour, an outdoor Mass with the people who knew him as their bishop for eight years, according to Reuters.
Leo, who was born in Chicago and lived in Peru for about 20 years, is on the final and most personal leg of a three-nation tour that also took him to Argentina and Uruguay. In just over a week in South America, he has drawn an estimated 10 million people to public events, according to Reuters. Crowds in Peru have been the largest of his 18-month papacy: about 3 million people gathered in Lima on Wednesday after his arrival, and officials in Chiclayo estimated that a million could come for the Mass there.
In Lima, Leo told a crowd at the Gran Teatro Nacional that he considered Peru his homeland, drawing wide applause, according to Reuters. On Thursday he held six events, including a speech on the country’s future and a prayer vigil with young people in the national soccer stadium that drew a Vatican-estimated 360,000 people inside the stadium and on surrounding streets. The Vatican’s own account of the vigil put about 60,000 young people inside the stadium and a further 300,000 in the surrounding areas.
Chiclayo is different from the other stops because it is a homecoming. Leo served as the city’s bishop from 2015 to 2023, and residents remember him as their own pastor rather than as a visiting head of state. He was due to stay in the area until Sunday, leading eight events, including a private dinner with the priests who once reported to him as bishop, according to Reuters. He then continues to Cusco, in the Andes Mountains, and the Amazonian city of Pucallpa, before the tour ends on November 17.
The tour is one of the most intense foreign trips organized for a pope in decades, and it began less than a month after Leo underwent surgery for lung cancer, according to Reuters. The crowds in Peru are the largest for a pope since about 7 million people greeted his predecessor, Francis, in the Philippines in 2015.
Why it matters: Leo is the first pope from the United States and the first to have spent so much of his ministry in Latin America, and this trip is his clearest statement of where his papacy looks for its center of gravity. For Peru, the visit has been a rare moment of national unity and pride, built around a man many Peruvians claim as one of their own. What happens next is quieter: after the weekend events in Chiclayo and the final stops in Cusco and Pucallpa, he returns to Rome with the largest crowds of his papacy behind him and the expectations that come with them.
Sources: Reuters reporting from Lima and Chiclayo; Holy See Press Office bulletin on the Lima prayer vigil.
