Pope Leo XIV returns today to Chiclayo, Peru, the northern city where he served as bishop for eight years, for the emotional centrepiece of his 12-day South America tour: an outdoor Mass expected to draw up to 915,000 people. The Pope Leo Chiclayo homecoming is the most personal stop of a trip that has already drawn the largest crowds of his 18-month papacy.
Crowds in Peru’s northern city gathered early on Friday ahead of the pope’s arrival, according to Reuters. Leo was due to arrive in Chiclayo from Lima around 9 a.m. local time and will stay in the area until Sunday to lead eight events, including a private dinner with the priests who once reported to him as bishop and the coronation of the Immaculate Virgin at St Mary’s Cathedral. The Mass will be held on the pampas, or plains, of Pimentel, where local landowners volunteered their property to host the pope. The diocese’s current record Mass attendance is about 20,000 people for the citywide Corpus Christi Mass, so a crowd approaching a million would be historic.
“Padre Roberto” Comes Home
Long before he was named the 267th supreme pontiff, Pope Leo was known to the people of Chiclayo as either “Monseñor Roberto” or simply “Padre Roberto”. The American-born pontiff, born Robert Prevost in Chicago, spent about two decades as a missionary in Peru and led the Chiclayo diocese from 2014 to 2023. Signs across the city proclaim Chiclayo as “The Capital of Friendship” and the “City of Pope Leo XIV”, and residents say the pope’s return is a homecoming, not a visit. “It means the love he has for this land, and for us, an enormous joy and satisfaction to have him home again,” one resident told OSV News.
Crowds for Leo’s visit to Peru have been the largest of his papacy, with some 3 million gathering in Lima on Wednesday after his arrival from Argentina, where he drew 650,000 to a Mass in Cordoba. Leo, who began his South America tour less than a month after surgery that removed a malignant tumour from his right lung, has appeared in good form on one of the most intense foreign tours arranged for a pope in decades. He declared on Wednesday that Peru, where he served as a missionary for about 20 years, was his homeland.
A 400-Year-Old Miracle Hope
Residents of Eten, a town near Chiclayo, hope the pope will revive a cause he once championed: Vatican recognition of a Eucharistic miracle they believe occurred nearly four centuries ago, when the child Jesus appeared twice in 1649 in a consecrated host. After Chiclayo, Leo will travel to the Peruvian Amazon, where on Sunday afternoon he will celebrate Mass in Pucallpa, the first time a pope has done so in the region. He will also meet Indigenous, Afro-descendant and migrant communities during his visit to the country. Read our earlier report on the Cordoba Mass here: https://reportrig.com/pope-leo-xiv-draws-650000-to-cordoba-mass-in-argentina-visit/
