Pope Leo XIV warns poverty is emptying Peru’s remote Inca communities
On the penultimate day of his 12-day tour of South America, Pope Leo XIV, 71, flew by helicopter to Santa Cruz de Succhabamba in Peru’s Andes, a town among green peaks above 2,000 metres (6,560 feet). One month after cancer surgery, the US-born head of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics — who holds Peruvian citizenship and once served there as missionary Robert Francis Prevost, visiting on horseback — was determined to return. Thousands of faithful cheered his arrival before colourful murals; he later toured in a popemobile as pilgrims who had camped overnight or walked mountain paths from surrounding villages waved.
At an open-air Mass he spoke of returning to steep hills, ravines and fertile valleys in a land of Andean roots where the Inca Empire flourished and a deep Christian faith took hold. He also said that heartland is suffering: remote communities he knew as a missionary are shrinking as poverty drives people toward coastal cities such as Lima and Trujillo. In Cajamarca, where Santa Cruz sits, more than 40 percent of residents live in poverty — the highest share in Peru — and the region has lost more people to internal migration than any other, with some 729,000 natives now living elsewhere. Leo cited declining birth rates emptying villages and unequal access to the land’s resources, while praising farmers, shopkeepers and small-business owners who create dignified work.
Organiser Jorge Villegas said the pope had hoped for a second stop at higher, Quechua-speaking Incahuasi, where Prevost celebrated Mass in 2023 despite rains and a dangerous river; that proved too complicated this time. Earlier Saturday, Leo returned to his former cathedral in Chiclayo, where he was bishop from 2015 to 2023. In Zaña, about 45 kilometres southeast, children ran to hug him before he visited a shrine to Toribio de Mogrovejo and paid tribute to Africans enslaved on colonial sugar plantations, also speaking of families living in fear of crime, extortion and insecurity. Idaura Fernandez, 42, said the visit filled locals with joy; Irma Villalobos, 61, born in Santa Cruz and now in Chiclayo, hoped it would transform the province.
Continue in the app — vote & join in ➔