Cancer Surgery Won’t Stop Pope Leo’s Peru Homecoming – Vatican

Chiclayo to Zaña, the country that made Robert Prevost is refurbishing churches for a pope it still remembers in rubber boots — even as two in ten of its adults have stopped calling themselves Catholic.

Pope Leo XIV will keep his South America tour, the Vatican confirmed on Monday, with the 6–17 November itinerary through Uruguay, Argentina and Peru intact. It comes weeks after the 71-year-old pope underwent surgery for lung cancer.

For Peru, this is not a state visit to a foreign dignitary. Robert Prevost arrived in 1985 at age 30 as an Augustinian missionary, returned in 2014, and became bishop of Chiclayo in 2015.

He took Peruvian citizenship, and in 2020, during one of the world’s strictest pandemic quarantines, helped open a soup kitchen in the small town of Zaña. “He gave us an example of human charity, and we prepared the ‘aguadito con fe’,” said former cook Betty Burga Campos.

Residents remember a bishop in constant motion: horseback trips to isolated Andean communities, long self-driven hauls across the country’s north, and rubber boots through knee-deep water during the 2017/2023 El Niño flooding. “The distances were not limits, the distances were opportunities,” said Father David Farfán of Zaña.

Journalist Verónica Castillo of Chiclayo recalls a prelate who “wasn’t very focused on being with the press; he was more with the poor and in social conflicts,” citing his mediation of a violent labour dispute against a sugar company in 2015.

In 2018 he founded a Catholic organisation in Chiclayo for Venezuelan newcomers, which has since assisted thousands; Peru hosts the world’s second-largest Venezuelan diaspora, more than 1.5 million people.

The political and religious backdrop is harder than the welcome. Pew Research Center puts Peruvian adult Catholic identification at 67%, down from 76% a decade earlier to 2024, a slide linked to social change and distrust of institutions after a decade that saw nine presidents.

The visit carries unfinished local business too: in Eten, near Chiclayo, Catholics hope Leo will advance Vatican recognition of a reported 1649 Eucharistic miracle he backed as bishop.

Meanwhile commerce has already decided — Gamarra seamstresses are printing the pope eating ceviche, under the slogan “The Pope and the papa are Peruvian,” with one maker predicting a 200% jump in orders.