Pope Leo XIV has arrived in Uruguay to begin a 12-day, three-country tour of South America that will take him on to Argentina and Peru. It is the longest and most far-reaching trip of his papacy and his first major journey since surgery last month to remove the lower lobe of his right lung. The 71-year-old pontiff told reporters on the flight that he was in "pretty good health" and that he never doubted the journey should go ahead, even though it was thrown into doubt when doctors found a tumour during a routine scan.
The case for going ahead is strong. The Vatican says the pope has completed a two-week recovery period and requires no further treatment, and his doctors say the cancer has not spread. The trip carries deep personal meaning, since Peru, the final stop, is where Leo spent two decades as a missionary and then Bishop of Chiclayo, and he became a Peruvian citizen in 2015. In Argentina he will fulfil a wish of Pope Francis, who never returned to his homeland during his papacy. In Montevideo, crowds of up to 30,000 people lined the streets, according to the Vatican, and his first speech called for universal healthcare to be accessible to everyone.
Yet the risks and the doubts are real. The schedule includes 12 flights, 36 speeches and 10 cities, covering more than 20,000 miles, and Cusco in Peru sits above 11,000 feet, where altitude sickness may require supplemental oxygen. Uruguay is a small, famously secular country of about 3.5 million people, where only about a third of residents identify as Catholic, according to pollster CIFRA. A proposed address to parliament was scrapped after public and political backlash, and the crowd at Plaza Independencia did not fill even half the square. Some residents say Leo is less well known than Francis was, and one Montevideo resident said he does not feel as influential, though he was willing to give the new pope a chance because he is South American. The Vatican's new communications chief, Maria Montserrat Alvarado, answered the question of why Uruguay with the words "Why not?" and said the Gospel is meant to go everywhere.
What happens on this tour will matter across the region. In Argentina, Leo faces an early test of how he deals with right-wing populist leaders, because President Javier Milei's austerity measures have pushed millions into poverty and the pope has long championed the poor. The pope has also clashed with President Donald Trump over immigration, and his encyclical on artificial intelligence calls for safeguards that Milei's light-touch approach does not provide. Peru's welcome, where he will meet President Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of the former dictator Alberto Fujimori, will be closely watched, because Leo openly criticised military violence and human rights abuses during that dictatorship and supported the effort that led to the country's Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Leo has chosen to trust his doctors and travel to the continent that shaped him. Whether the journey strengthens his health, his message and his standing in Latin America will become clear over the next twelve days.