Pope Leo XIV touches down in Latin America on Nov. 6, 2026, a journey that is as much a homecoming as it is a diplomatic tightrope walk. The pontiff, who spent two decades in Peru and holds Peruvian citizenship, returns to a region where the very soil of his early ministry was tilled by one of the Catholic Church’s most fiercely debated movements: liberation theology. His itinerary, weaving from Uruguay to Argentina and finally to Peru, deliberately places him in the cross-currents of a church still wrestling with the ghosts of that era. He will meet with right-wing presidents in Argentina and Peru, yet his schedule also includes a stop at Casavalle, one of Uruguay’s poorest neighborhoods, and a visit to a Catholic home for the disabled in Argentina—echoing the church’s historic focus on the marginalized.
Pope’s Peru Pilgrimage Walks a Theological Tightrope
The stakes of this trip are amplified by the specific sites on his map. In Chiclayo, Peru, the city where Leo served as a bishop, he will pray at a chapel dedicated to St. Óscar Romero. This is no casual stop. The chapel stands as a monument to a man assassinated in 1980 after years of speaking out against the human rights violations committed by the U.S.-supported Salvadoran military. Romero’s ministry was influenced by liberation theology, a movement born in Peru and one that deeply influenced Latin American Catholicism during Leo’s years in Peru. The pope’s prayer at Romero’s chapel speaks volumes, especially against the current backdrop of strikes against suspected drug traffickers, which human rights groups have criticized as extrajudicial killings. It’s a subtle yet powerful echo of Romero’s final plea: “Cease the repression!”
The Roots of a Revolution in Pastoral Practice
To understand the weight of this moment, one must understand liberation theology. The name itself was coined in a 1968 lecture by Gustavo Gutiérrez, a Peruvian theologian and priest, who later expanded his ideas in the 1971 book, “A Theology of Liberation.” The movement was a radical reimagining of the church’s role. Gutiérrez and his contemporaries argued that Christians had a moral duty to liberate the oppressed, seeing poverty, violence, and discrimination not just as social problems, but as collective sins. They went beyond traditional charity, building community organizations, labor unions, and work cooperatives—like the transportation, corn milling, and carpentry cooperatives priests and nuns organized in rural Mexico—to measurably improve the lives of the poor. Their analysis, drawn partly from Marxist ideas, sought to understand how international and national companies profited from the low wages of Peru’s miners and farmers, a nation rich in natural resources. This was, in essence, a pastoral revolution aimed at systemic change.
Cold War Politics Challenged the Vatican's Vision
This bold vision, however, collided head-on with the political realities of the Cold War. The Vatican, which had long critiqued the worst excesses of capitalism while rejecting socialism and communism, found itself in a dilemma. Pope Paul VI in the 1960s and ’70s had generally supported local initiatives by liberationist Catholics. But the election of Polish cardinal Karol Józef Wojtyla as Pope John Paul II in 1978 marked a shift. As a staunch opponent of communism, John Paul and one of his top Vatican officials, Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, worried about liberation theology’s use of Marxist analysis. The Vatican began investigating theologians for violations of church teachings. In 1985, Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff was ordered to observe a year of silence for his critique of the church’s hierarchy, and several priests were suspended over their work in Sandinista Nicaragua. Gutiérrez was also investigated by Peruvian bishops, though he ultimately was not punished, perhaps due to his consistent opposition to armed revolution, a stance made relevant by violence in Peru from the 1980s into the ’90s.
A Pope Shaped by a Fractured Church
Robert Prevost arrived in Peru in 1985 for missionary work, landing in Chulucanas—a region of pastoral experimentation. The Augustinian missionaries there had been working closely with the community since the 1960s to provide literacy education, discussion groups about poverty and inequality, and workshops to train artisans. While these programs were a far cry from the more radical actions of some Catholics who supported liberation theology, this work shared the same core belief: that the church could help empower the poor and alleviate oppression. Pope Leo’s journey as a young priest was shaped by this crucible—the debates, the conflicts, and the daily work of living out a faith in a country being torn apart by violence and ideological struggle.
“I beseech you, I beg you, I command you in the name of God: Cease the repression!”
This trip, then, is more than a papal tour; it is a personal reckoning for a pope whose theological DNA was forged in the fire of Peru’s social and ecclesial conflicts. His itinerary is a masterclass in balancing acts—meeting with presidents while visiting the poor, honoring a martyr of the left without uttering a word of political critique. He must carefully manage a history that is both his own and that of the entire Latin American church.
More on Pope Leo
Chiclayo: the chapel rebuilt thanks to Pope Leo XIV awaits his visit. In the poor El Bosque neighbourhood (La Victoria), the San Óscar Romero Chapel was rebuilt from scratch with donations from US benefactors known to the Pope, after the involvement of Edgard Rimaycuna, Pope Leo… pic.twitter.com/HsrmfDC32d
