CHICLAYO, Peru — Pope Leo XIV returned Friday to his beloved former diocese of Chiclayo and said it was a "joy" to be home, as he visited some of his old stomping grounds and highlighted the social justice-minded mark he left behind.
The pontiff, known here as “Padre Robert,” celebrated his first Mass on Peruvian soil on a vast, dusty field outside Chiclayo. The Vatican estimated 1 million people had lined his motorcade route to the Mass and that 500,000 attended.
“What a joy it is to return to Chiclayo! It is a blessing for me to be with you once again,” he said. Recalling the lung cancer surgery he underwent a month ago Friday, Leo said he was recovering “with God’s help."
Chiclayo, population 700,000, is the commercial hub of Peru's northern Pacific coast. But much of the world heard about it on the night of Leo's election, May 8, 2025, when he gave Chiclayo a shoutout in Spanish from the loggia of St. Peter's Basilica.
And on Friday, Chiclayo welcomed its former shepherd home.
“I’m elated. He has decided to return to Chiclayo and we have him here, with us -- home,” said Julie Albujar, who woke before dawn with her sister to travel to the Mass site, where they were tasked with taking the collection. “This is a party and it’s a sign of our faith and our love for the pope.”
Beloved for being close to the poor
The former Robert Prevost spent two decades as a missionary priest and bishop in Peru and credits the place and its people with teaching him how to be a shepherd. Pope Francis sent the Chicago-born Augustinian to take over as bishop of Chiclayo in 2014 and he stayed until Francis summoned him to Rome in 2023 to run the Vatican's bishops' office.
In hindsight, the 2023 transfer to Rome signaled that Francis saw in Prevost a potential successor, since the job is one of the most important in the church and would give Prevost the Vatican experience that many consider necessary to be a viable contender for the papacy.
But Prevost’s heart is in Chiclayo, where he remains beloved for championing social justice issues and for his closeness to the people, especially poor people, during times of crisis. And he had quite a few during his tenure: COVID-19, devastating floods, and a surge of Venezuelan migrants as the humanitarian situation worsened there in 2018.
“I’m so glad he’s returning,” said Rolando Antonio Mendoza, who was selling posters bearing the pope’s image in front of the cathedral where Leo used to celebrate Mass. “Even though he’s now Pope Leo XIV, he hasn’t forgotten about his homeland.”
Leo balanced his joyful homecoming with some marching orders for his former diocese. He told students at the Catholic university that technological progress that doesn’t respect justice and the dignity of workers becomes “a mechanism of oppression and exclusion.”
“Precisely because scientific progress is a supreme achievement of human intelligence, it must not be confused with a privilege reserved for millionaires seeking immortality, while entire peoples suffer from poverty and oppression,” he warned.
A giddy and emotional pope on his home turf
Ever since Leo touched down on Peruvian soil on Wednesday, the world has seen a very different pope.
Normally reserved and placid, the 71-year-old Leo has seemed at turns positively giddy, and at others overwhelmed with emotion to the point of tears, as he was on Friday.
Chiclayo seminarian Darwin Sánchez, who carried the pope’s miter during the Mass, said Leo greeted all the servers before Mass and was “very moved.”
“It was truly touching; thank God everything went well,” he said.
It wasn’t Sánchez’s first run-in with Leo. He recalled a Mass when, as a young altar boy, he mishandled the censer and passed it on to the man who was then bishop of Chiclayo.
After the service, Prevost took him aside and affectionately told him to be a bit more careful: Prevost had burned his hand when the chain fell into the hot charcoal, but he kept carrying it and didn’t complain or reprimand Sánchez in front of others.
“He’s approachable, happy and he gave me the strength and courage to follow my vocation,” Sánchez said.
As the Mass ended, the crowd erupted into a chant that reaffirmed their pride in calling the spiritual leader of more than 1.4 billion Catholics their own:
“El papa es Chiclayano!” they joyously yelled in Spanish: “The pope is Chiclayano.”
A prayer at a chapel dedicated to Romero
After Mass, Leo went to pray in a chapel dedicated to St. Oscar Romero, beloved among the working class and poor for defending them against repression by El Salvador’s army.
Prevost had spearheaded the chapel’s construction during his time as bishop, and its completion was achieved through the efforts of the Rev. Edgar Rimaycuna, his personal secretary.
Leo’s decision to go there was symbolically significant.
When Prevost first arrived in Chiclayo, priests from the conservative Opus Dei movement had long had something of a monopoly on the diocese’s parishes, alienating the faithful who had a more social justice bent and were devoted to Romero, according to the new biography “American Pope,” by NPR reporters Daniel Burke and Scott Detrow.
When the previous Opus-affiliated bishop retired, Francis saw an opportunity to break the Opus hold on Chiclayo and implement a different, more decentralized style of leadership where lay people had a greater role, especially in the church’s outreach to poor people.
Prevost was his man.
Prevost had embraced that style of parish life in the diocese of Trujillo, Peru, where he worked as a young missionary priest, said the Rev. John Lydon, a fellow Augustinian who lived with Prevost in Trujillo in those years from 1990-1999.
He said many of the Augustinians in Peru at the time had a devotion to Romero, Prevost included.
“This was before he was canonized by Pope Francis, but we always referred to him in the house in Trujillo as Santo Oscar de las Americas,” Lydon said in an interview. “So we canonized him before the church.”
Inspired by Romero and the “preferential option for the poor” ethos of the Latin American church, Prevost embraced a model of church organization that involved dividing up the diocese into zones with lay teams that would lead the life of the church in those zones.
“It’s a decentralization of the evangelization, trying to go out to where the people are, not wait for them to come to the church building, which was the traditional model,” said Lydon.
In Chiclayo, Prevost worked hard to try to bring about change while careful not to alienate the Opus priests, the biographers wrote. Significantly, he left in place the huge portrait of the Opus founder St. Josemaría Escrivá in the Chiclayo cathedral.
On Friday, Leo met with priests, nuns and the lay teams in his former diocese. He reminded them of the model he brought to the diocese over a decade ago, where everyone who is baptized is responsible for spreading the faith.
“Working for justice, peace and the common good are not optional tasks,” he said. “They are requirements of our ecclesial mission.”
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