Twelve days, twelve flights. The Pope sets off for South America again following his lung operation

The Pope departed this morning from Fiumicino for Montevideo, the first stop on a tour of Uruguay, Argentina and Peru that will last until 17 November. Spanning twelve days, it is the longest journey of Leo XIV’s pontificate, one day longer than the one undertaken in Africa this spring. Twelve flights, two helicopter journeys, nine Masses and thirty-six speeches. In the space of a single afternoon, the Pope will fly to Cusco, at an altitude of over three thousand metres, for a prayer service, and then to Pucallpa in the Amazon rainforest for a Mass. It is a gruelling schedule for anyone, and even more so for a 71-year-old man who underwent surgery at the Gemelli Hospital on 13 October. Two days earlier, during the Angelus, he himself had announced to the faithful that he had a lump in his lung. Professor Stefano Margaritora’s team removed the lower lobe of his right lung, and the histological examination confirmed a pulmonary adenocarcinoma, the most common form of lung cancer. On 26 October, the Vatican announced that the disease was localised, that no further cancer treatment was required, and that the Pope’s personal physician, Luigi Carbone, saw no contraindications to the trip.

During his hospitalisation, the journey was far from a foregone conclusion. Secretary of State Pietro Parolin had said that it was necessary to await the doctors’ advice. Meanwhile, from the Gemelli Hospital, Leo XIV telephoned Putin to request a humanitarian truce for Oleshky, and eight days after the operation he was back in the popemobile in St Peter’s Square. As Matteo Matzuzzi reported two days ago in Il Foglio, the Pope has even resumed flying: on the return flight from France, the press conference on abuse angered the former president of the German Bishops’ Conference, Georg Bätzing.

According to Leone’s lifelong friends, interviewed by the New York Times, the idea of postponing the trip never even crossed his mind. The Vatican assures us that there will be no special arrangements, apart from medical assistance on board, but in Lima the archdiocese has organised the popemobile tours so that he does not have to stand for long periods, and at least in one location he will be able to take the lift instead of the stairs. The Vatican’s Foreign Minister, Archbishop Paul Gallagher, told journalists that the illness has dispelled the temptation to view Leone as a ‘super Pope’: he has fallen ill like so many others, and is a mere mortal like the rest of us.

His last trip before falling ill had been to France at the end of September: four days spent in Paris, Lourdes and Metz, which, according to Matzuzzi, left their mark on Leone’s young pontificate. In the country with the strictest secularism, the Pope had found a Catholic France that seemed to have vanished: eighty thousand young people singing the Salve Regina at the Saint-Denis stadium, two hundred thousand more worshippers than the six hundred thousand expected at Mass in the Place de la Concorde, priests hearing confessions whilst sitting on the pavements, and even Macron, who at the last minute had chosen to attend Mass in Metz. On his return to Rome, the Pope summed it all up in two words, referring to the French: “They are searching for something.” And it is with this same hope that he now arrives in Uruguay, the most secular country in Latin America, long regarded as a foretaste of what might happen to Catholicism across the rest of the continent, where participation in the life of the Church is in decline. In addition to Montevideo, he will visit Florida, at the shrine of Our Lady of the Thirty-Three, the country’s patron saint, and Paysandú.

On Sunday 8 November, Leone will arrive in Argentina, the homeland of his predecessor, Francis, who never returned there whilst he was Pope. Waiting for him in Buenos Aires is Javier Milei, whose views on unregulated artificial intelligence are diametrically opposed to those of the Pope.

On Wednesday 11th, the longest and most personal leg of the journey will begin in Peru, the country where Robert Prevost has spent half his life as a priest, where he served as Bishop of Chiclayo and of which he is a citizen. In addition to Lima and Chiclayo, he will travel to Cusco and Pucallpa to meet missionaries and representatives of the Amazonian peoples. There is also a delicate meeting scheduled: with President Keiko Fujimori, daughter of Alberto, the president convicted of human rights violations, against whose abuses the then Father Prevost had protested.

Milei and Fujimori are two of Trump’s allies, and the visit comes in the week following the US President’s defeat in the mid-term elections. The Pope took part in those elections: Leo XIV is the first Pontiff in history to have voted, by post, as an American citizen. His relationship with Trump is not the best: in the spring, the president described him as “weak” and ungrateful, given that, in his view, “it is thanks to me that he became Pope”. On 4 November, before setting off, Leone received another right-wing Latin American president, Chile’s José Antonio Kast, at the Vatican. But for the faithful awaiting him, in Lima as in the Amazon, the trip will above all be something else: the return of a Pope to the places where he served as a missionary, and proof that, four weeks after his operation, the Pope is well.