Vatican City.- Pope Leo XIV will travel to Uruguay, Argentina, and Peru from November 6 to 17, accepting the invitation of the Heads of State and ecclesiastical authorities of those respective countries, Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni reported this Wednesday.
On this trip, you will visit Montevideo, Paysandú, and Florida from November 6 to 8; Buenos Aires, Córdoba, and Luján from November 8 to 11; and Lima, Chiclayo, Cuzco, and Pucallpa from November 11 to 17.
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This extensive tour through Latin America, from November 6 to 17, with twelve days and ten cities, surpasses the previous record of the trip to Africa in April.
Pope Leo XIV, born in Chicago (United States), will thus return to Peru, a country of which he has held citizenship since 2015 and where he lived for nearly 20 years as an Augustinian missionary and subsequently as Bishop of Chiclayo for eight years before being called by Francis to head the Dicastery for Bishops.
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But he will also travel to two countries that Francis did not visit in his twelve years of pontificate: Argentina and Uruguay.
The trip to Uruguay, the nation with the lowest Catholic rate in all of Latin America (a little over 36%), will take place 40 years after the visit of John Paul II in 1987 and 1988.
This country, however, retains a deep popular religiosity, as explained by the Italian media, “evident in its devotion to its patron saint, the Virgin of the Thirty-Three, a small wooden Marian statue that, despite being located in a highly secular territory, is considered a symbol.” The Pope will pay tribute to the Virgin by traveling to Florida, where the original statue is kept in the cathedral.
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While the last visit of a Pope to Argentina was in 1987, when John Paul II toured ten cities. Leo XIV has scheduled a stop in Luján, where the country’s patron saint is venerated.
The trip will mark a return of a pope to Latin America, a region of special importance to the Catholic Church and where a significant portion of its faithful reside, since Francis’s last visit was to Panama, from January 23 to 28, 2019, on the occasion of the XXXIV World Youth Day (WYD).
The trip to Latin America will be Pope Leo XIV’s sixth international trip, following his visits to Turkey and Lebanon in November 2025; to the Principality of Monaco in March; to Algeria, Cameroon, Angola, and Equatorial Guinea in April; and to Spain in June. France will be the next trip from September 24 to 28.
