Pope Leo XIV returned Friday to his former diocese of Chiclayo, holding Mass on a field outside the city and urging that technological progress must respect justice and workers’ dignity.
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Pope Leo XIV returned Friday to his former diocese of Chiclayo, Peru, telling the crowds it was a “joy” to be home and a “blessing” to be with them again.
The pontiff, known in Chiclayo as “Padre Robert,” celebrated his first Mass on Peruvian soil on a vast, dusty field outside the city. The Vatican estimated that about 1 million people lined his motorcade route to the Mass site, and that 500,000 attended the service.
During the visit, the 71-year-old Pope said he was recovering “with God’s help” after undergoing lung cancer surgery a month earlier on a Friday. He had arrived in Peru on Wednesday, and on Friday appeared visibly moved as he returned to a community that helped shape his work as a shepherd.
Chiclayo, a commercial hub on Peru’s northern Pacific coast with a population of about 700,000, had become closely associated with him even before this homecoming. The city came to wider attention after his May 8, 2025 election, when he mentioned Chiclayo from the loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica.
Local residents described the return as personal and joyful. Julie Albujar said she and her sister woke before dawn to travel to the Mass site, where they were tasked with taking the collection, calling it “a party and it’s a sign of our faith and our love for the pope.” Rolando Antonio Mendoza, selling posters of the pope outside the cathedral where Leo once celebrated Mass, said the former bishop “hasn’t forgotten about his homeland.”
Leo’s homecoming also included remarks directed at his former diocese. Speaking to students at the Catholic university, he warned that technological progress that does not respect justice and the dignity of workers becomes “a mechanism of oppression and exclusion,” adding that scientific progress should not be treated as a privilege for “millionaires seeking immortality” while “entire peoples” suffer poverty and oppression.
Ahead of the Mass, seminarian Darwin Sánchez, who carried the pope’s miter, said Leo greeted all the servers before the service and was “very moved.” Sánchez described an earlier moment when, as a young altar boy, he mishandled the censer and was reprimanded only privately afterward, saying the pope had given him “strength and courage” to follow his vocation.
After the Mass, the crowd chanted “El papa es Chiclayano!”—“The pope is Chiclayano.”—as Leo remained in the city that shaped his earlier ministry.
Following the service, Leo went to pray in a chapel dedicated to St. Oscar Romero. The pope’s predecessor in Chiclayo, Robert Prevost, had spearheaded the chapel’s construction, with its completion achieved through the work of Rev. Edgar Rimaycuna, his personal secretary.
In Chiclayo, Leo also met with priests, nuns and the lay teams from his former diocese. He reminded them that “Working for justice, peace and the common good are not optional tasks,” saying they are “requirements of our ecclesial mission.”
Prevost spent two decades in Peru as a missionary priest and bishop before Pope Francis summoned him to Rome in 2023 to run the Vatican’s bishops’ office. Prevost had been named bishop of Chiclayo in 2014, taking over for Francis.
A fellow Augustinian, Rev. John Lydon, who lived with Prevost in Peru’s Trujillo from 1990 to 1999, said the diocesan approach Prevost brought to Chiclayo drew on a model that divided the diocese into zones supported by lay teams, described by Lydon as “a decentralization of the evangelization” aimed at going out to where people are rather than waiting for them to come to church buildings.
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