Pope Leo has finally come home! One million people in Chiclayo, Peru, cheered and welcomed the smiling pope as a hero, many with yellow and white balloons—the Vatican colors—along the road as he drove the nine miles from Chiclayo airport to the Pampas de Pimentel, a flat, almost desert area outside the city of Chiclayo, to celebrate Mass—his first public act on returning to his former diocese.
Though American-born, Pope Leo had served as a missionary in Peru from 1985 to 1998, and returned to the country as the bishop of the Diocese of Chiclayo from 2015 to 2023. He became a citizen of Peru in 2015.
On his first trip back since his election as pope last year, he arrived at Chiclayo Air Base at 9:20 a.m. (local time) after a 90-minute flight from Lima. He had often travelled this way before, but today was much different. He was coming home as the Successor of Peter, and the whole city, young and old, seemed to have turned out to see him. They shouted “Bienvenida a casa” (“Welcome home”) as he passed by on this Friday morning, Nov. 13, on the way to the Pampas de Pimentel, where more than half a million more had been waiting for him for many hours. It was fiesta time for them; Monseñor Roberto was back with them, even if only until Sunday.
There was great excitement in the air at Pampas de Pimentel. People jumped with joy, waved and cheered when he drove in the popemobile among the crowd. They chanted “Il papa es Chiclayano” (“the pope is Chiclayan”) and “Il papa es Peruano” (“The pope is Peruvian”).
I saw in the crowd a large flag of the United States, but for the people of Chiclayo, Leo is Peruvian; he speaks their language, knows their customs and likes their music—we saw him join in the singing at the football stadium in Lima last evening with 60,000 young people, and at the end of Mass today he clearly enjoyed the Marinera Norteña traditional dance.
“What a joy it is to return to Chiclayo! It is a blessing for me to be with you once again,” a beaming Pope Leo told them as he began his homily. They responded with a rousing cheer.
“Thank you for your affection, support and prayers, especially for my health during this time of trial, which, with God’s help, I am overcoming,” he added, drawing more applause. He has recovered remarkably well from his operation that removed a malignant tumor and lower lobe of his right lung, just over four weeks ago. Seeing him, one would not imagine that he had been through what he called a “time of trial.”
“As I look at your faces,” he said, “a prayer of thanks to the Lord arises in my heart for the blessing you have been and continue to be in my life and episcopal ministry.”
Among those attending his Mass and listening to his words were Peru’s President Keiko Fujimori and several government ministers.
“I keep you very much in my prayers,” he said. “I also ask you to continue praying for me, that our Lord Jesus Christ may grant me the grace to strengthen always my brothers and sisters in the faith.”
After those personal remarks, Pope Leo returned to being a missionary and sought to focus their attention on Christ.
Taking his cue from the scriptural readings at the Mass, he reminded them of “the urgent and binding duty of every baptized person to proclaim the Gospel.” He told them, “[A]ll Christians, whether ordained ministers or lay faithful—regardless of the degree of formation we have received in the faith—are missionary disciples.” Indeed, “no baptized person can be indifferent to the task of evangelization, given that it is the church’s essential mission, her deepest vocation and her very reason for being.”
He said: “God willed that the church should be ‘like a universal sacrament of salvation.’ Sustained by the Holy Spirit, the church carries forward the mission of proclaiming Jesus Christ so that his redemptive work may reach the ends of the earth and transform human realities according to the values of the Gospel.”
Speaking in Spanish, the Augustinian missionary pope told those present, and a much bigger national audience following on television or radio, “Proclaiming Jesus Christ is a crucial task, for which we often feel inadequate.” He asked: “As missionary disciples” in the 21st century, “how can we proclaim him today? As a family, or as a parish or diocesan community, how can we carry out the mission of evangelization?”
The answer, he said, is “through the witness of an authentically Christian and coherent life. First, we must place Jesus Christ at the center, both of our proclamation and of our existence.” He reminded them, however, that “coherence is not merely the fruit of our own will, but it is also a grace for which we must implore the Lord” because “he alone has the power to transform our lives and renew our enthusiasm for proclaiming and handing on the faith, enabling us to help the brothers and sisters we meet along our pilgrimage to live a personal relationship with Christ and discover the joy of the Gospel.”
He also reminded them that “the Lord awaits us above all” in the Eucharist and in Scripture, as well as “through ecclesial communion and the fraternal welcome we extend to our neighbor, where we find him present and in need.”
He explained that “evangelizing does not mean imposing doctrines or trusting in efficient strategies, but bearing witness to that real encounter with Jesus Christ.” He described it as “a task marked by joy, since the joy of the Gospel is renewed and multiplied when it is shared.”
To accomplish this task well, he said, “it may help us to recover the practice of ‘praying together,’ especially in our homes, remembering that Christian families are the missionary nucleus….[T]hey lead their members to participate actively in the life of local communities, of the larger community of the universal church and of society as a whole.”
“For a baptized person, love of neighbor is at the heart of the Christian message,” he said.
Drawing on his 20 years of missionary experience in this part of Peru, he reminded them that “mission cannot be improvised” and emphasized that “every Christian is a missionary to the extent that he or she has encountered the love of God in Christ Jesus.”
He prayed that “this love may set fire to the life of each one of us, so that, as baptized persons and as a Christian community, we may go out into the world and spread to others the joy born of our encounter with the risen Lord. May we make that joy present in our families, in our workplaces through the excellence of our professional work and in the public sphere, resisting the temptation to relegate faith to the private realm.”
Pope Leo concluded:
Dear brothers and sisters, the world is waiting for us and the mission is only beginning. Therefore, here in Chiclayo and throughout Peru, I invite you—beginning with this first celebration of our reunion at the Lord’s altar—to commit yourselves to sharing the living hope that is Jesus Christ and to let the Gospel “overflow” from our villages, towns and cities, proclaiming to all the “glory of the Lord.”
They applauded at the end of his homily, as they had done several times while he was speaking.
He came to Peru as a missionary priest in 1985, and today, 41 years later, he returned as a missionary pope. That was but the beginning of his three-day visit to his former diocese and the surrounding region.
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