Pope Leo XIV opens Latin America tour in Uruguay, three weeks after lung surgery

Pope Leo XIV landed at Carrasco International Airport outside Montevideo on Friday afternoon, becoming the first pope to set foot in Uruguay since John Paul II's visit in 1988 and opening a 12-day tour of Latin America just three weeks after surgery to remove a cancerous section of his lung. The 71-year-old pontiff, born Robert Prevost, is spending three days in Uruguay before moving on to Argentina and then Peru, the country where he spent two decades as a missionary and bishop.

The Vatican estimated that roughly 30,000 people lined the motorcade route and gathered for his first public appearance, though, as the Associated Press reported, the crowd that assembled at Montevideo's Plaza Independencia for the formal welcome ceremony was markedly smaller, filling less than half of the historic square. According to the trip's official Vatican itinerary, Leo arrived at 4:30 p.m. local time, was welcomed at the plaza an hour later, met briefly with civil society figures and the diplomatic corps, then paid a courtesy visit to President Yamandú Orsi before leading vespers at Montevideo's Metropolitan Cathedral.

A homecoming delayed by illness

The visit had been uncertain as recently as mid-October, when doctors operated on October 13 to remove the lower lobe of Leo's right lung after a cancerous growth was detected. Vatican officials said this week that he had completed the two-week recovery period his medical team required and needed no further treatment before travelling, though a doctor and nurse are accompanying him for the duration of the trip. The Vatican's communications chief, Maria Montserrat Alvarado, said the pope's physicians were "very confident" in his ability to withstand an itinerary that, across all three countries, includes ten cities, twelve flights — two of them by helicopter — and roughly three dozen public addresses, among them a stop in Cusco, Peru, more than 11,000 feet above sea level.

Leo told reporters aboard the flight from Rome that he felt "fairly good" and had "no doubt" the journey should proceed as planned. The Holy See Press Office first announced the journey in early August, describing it as a response to invitations from the heads of state and bishops of Uruguay, Argentina and Peru. Uruguay's government formally confirmed the visit the same week, with the foreign ministry calling it the first papal trip to the country in 38 years and noting that Orsi had personally invited Leo during a meeting at the Vatican in October 2025.

A message tailored to a secular nation

Uruguay has the smallest share of practicing Catholics of any country in Latin America, with surveys putting church affiliation at roughly a third of the population, and its government has for decades pursued a strict separation of church and state. Leo's remarks at Plaza Independencia, delivered in Spanish, were widely read as an attempt to engage that secular identity rather than confront it directly, even as he touched on subjects where Vatican teaching and Uruguayan law diverge.

He devoted much of the address to Uruguay's suicide rate, among the highest in Latin America, citing a figure of 19.16 deaths per 100,000 people in 2025.

"Loneliness, anxiety and the loss of hope can become so profound that a person no longer sees a reason to continue living. None should ever feel like a stranger among their own, or think that their absence matters less than their presence."

He also called universal access to health care "a duty that confronts every society," drawing explicitly on his own illness: the experience, he said, made him think of "the many men and women who lack the means to obtain a timely diagnosis." Leo added that it was "everyone's responsibility to ensure that each person can live with dignity, receive the care they need" through to the end of life — language that Uruguayan commentators and at least one wire report characterized as an implicit rebuke of the country's abortion law, decriminalized in 2012, and its 2025 statute permitting medically assisted dying, both of which conflict with Catholic doctrine. He separately praised Uruguay's electrical grid, which now draws nearly all its power from renewable sources, calling it "a remarkable achievement that required sustained decisions over many years" and linking it to what he called a shared duty to future generations.

Church, state and a scrapped invitation

The visit has not been without friction. Earlier this year, a group of Uruguayan legislators, led by the president of the lower house, proposed inviting Leo to address a joint session of the General Assembly at the Palacio Legislativo, an idea that drew enough political pushback that organizers quietly dropped it; no address to parliament appears on the published itinerary. Montevideo's archbishop, Cardinal Daniel Sturla, has instead framed the trip, as Al Jazeera noted in its arrival coverage, as a message aimed at "creyentes y no creyentes" — believers and non-believers alike — telling local reporters that public interest in the visit extends well beyond the Catholic Church. Tickets for Saturday's open-air Mass in Paysandú and Sunday's Mass in Florida, both free, sold out within hours of being released.

Leo is also scheduled to visit Casavalle, a Montevideo neighborhood affected by gang violence, on Saturday, before a prayer vigil at the Centenario Stadium that evening and a final Mass in Florida on Sunday at the national shrine of Our Lady of the Thirty-Three.

What comes next

Leo departs Montevideo on Sunday afternoon for Buenos Aires, opening an Argentine leg that fulfills a trip Pope Francis, an Argentine native, never made during his own pontificate. Argentine officials and commentators have flagged possible friction between Leo and President Javier Milei over economic austerity and artificial-intelligence regulation, issues on which the pope has previously spoken critically. The tour's final and longest stretch, from November 11 to 17, takes Leo to Peru, where he lived for roughly two decades as a missionary, seminary professor and eventually bishop of Chiclayo before his election last year. That leg includes a private visit to a chapel in his former diocese and a meeting with President Keiko Fujimori, whose father's human-rights record Leo criticized publicly while serving in the country.

Vatican officials have described the itinerary as one of the most physically demanding foreign trips of Leo's young pontificate, and the coming eleven days will be the clearest public test yet of whether his recovery holds under the strain of sustained travel, altitude and a packed public schedule.