Pope Leo XIV departs for 12 day tour of South America

ABOARD THE PAPAL PLANE (OSV News) — Pope Leo XIV departed Rome for Uruguay on the morning of Nov. 6 at the start of a 12-day trip to South America, the longest international journey of his pontificate, a little over three weeks after undergoing surgery for lung cancer.

The Nov. 6-17 trip will be his first visit to Latin America since his election as pope, bringing him back to the continent that shaped his life and ministry, first as a missionary priest then bishop in Peru, where he will spend the final and longest leg of the trip.

The papal plane, a chartered ITA Airways plane, took off from Rome’s Fiumicino International Airport at 7:05 a.m. Rome time at the start of the apostolic journey to Uruguay, Argentina, and Peru.

The 13 hour and 30 minute flight will bring the pope across the Atlantic Ocean, flying more than 6,900 miles over France, Algeria, Mauritania, Senegal, and Brazil before arriving in Uruguay’s capital city of Montevideo at 4:30 p.m. local time (2:30 p.m. EST).

It is the first of 14 flights Pope Leo will take in an ambitious itinerary that will bring the 71-year-old pope to a new destination nearly every day, including a 2,200-mile flight from Buenos Aires to Lima and a military helicopter flight Nov. 14 to the Andes mountain town of Santa Cruz de Succhabamba, Peru.

The pope is making the trip just 24 days after undergoing a lobectomy surgery for localized lung adenocarcinoma on Oct. 13 in which the cancerous lower lobe of the pope’s right lung was removed. Pope Leo’s doctors confirmed the following week that the pope did not require further oncological treatment after surgery.

Vatican officials said that no changes were made to the pope’s schedule in South America to account for his recent hospitalization.

“He is clinically fit to undertake this trip,” Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni told journalists on Nov. 3.

His doctors “are very confident and he’ll have plenty of medical care on board should something happen. But we don’t see that in his prognosis,” Maria Montserrat Alvarado, the prefect of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Communication, added.

Pope Leo will start his journey in Uruguay — the most secularized country in Latin America. It will be the first papal visit there since St. John Paul II’s in 1988. Pope Leo will visit Montevideo, the capital and largest city; Paysandú, a cultural and economic hub on the border with Argentina; and Florida, home to the National Sanctuary of Our Lady of the Thirty-Three on the Nov. 8 date of the annual national pilgrimage to the Marian shrine.

In Argentina, where he arrives on the afternoon of Nov. 8, he will meet a challenge of stepping into the land of his predecessor Pope Francis, the Argentine pontiff who never visited his homeland as pope, and a country that Archbishop Jorge Ignacio García Cuerva of Buenos Aires recently described as “a wounded Argentina, a divided Argentina.” St. John Paul II made the last papal visit to Argentina in 1987, nearly four decades ago.

Pope Leo will visit Buenos Aires; Córdoba, the country’s second-largest city; and Luján, where he will celebrate Mass at the Shrine of Our Lady of Luján, Argentina’s patroness and one of its leading pilgrimage sites.

The trip culminates with Pope Leo’s homecoming to Peru, where he first arrived as an Augustinian missionary priest in 1985, including a two-day stay in Chiclayo, where Pope Leo served as bishop from 2015 to 2023.

In Peru, where he holds citizenship , the pope will also visit Lima, the capital and largest city; Chiclayo; Cusco, the former Inca capital in the Andes; and Pucallpa, a city on the Ucayali River in the Amazon rainforest that has long been a center of Catholic missionary outreach.

During the 12-day trip, Pope Leo will celebrate nine public Masses, visit seven cathedrals and preside over two stadium prayer vigils before returning to Rome on the morning of Nov. 17.

Pope Leo asked for prayers for the fruitfulness of his apostolic journey in his Nov. 4 general audience ahead of the papal trip.

“I entrust myself to your prayers, that this trip may strengthen faith, renew hope, rekindle the fire of charity, and serve as an impetus to continue proclaiming the Gospel with joy,” Pope Leo said.

Read more Vatican News

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