Pope Leo has come home to Chiclayo, the northern Peruvian city where he served as bishop for eight years, and a vast crowd gathered outside the city early on Friday for an outdoor Mass at the center of his 12-day South America tour, 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. Officials in Chiclayo estimated that a million people could come for the Mass, after about 3 million gathered in Lima on Wednesday.
Across South America he has drawn an estimated 10 million people to public events in just over a week, the largest crowds of his 18-month papacy, according to Reuters. Chiclayo 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. In Lima he told a crowd that he considered Peru his homeland. The Peru crowds are the largest for a pope since about 7 million people greeted his predecessor, Francis, in the Philippines in 2015.
He was due to stay in the Chiclayo area until Sunday, leading eight events, and then continues to Cusco, in the Andes Mountains, and the Amazonian city of Pucallpa, before the tour ends on November 17. Leo is the first pope from the United States and the first to have spent so much of his ministry in Latin America. This video is an original Zark News graphic production; no third-party footage is used.
Full story: https://zarknews.com/pope-leo-chiclayo-peru-crowds-south-america-tour/
Sources: Reuters • November 15, 2026. Zark News illustration.
