Pope Leo returns to 'second home' Chiclayo a month after lung cancer surgery

Pope Leo has made an emotional return to Chiclayo in Peru, the city where he served as bishop for eight years, greeted by huge crowds exactly one month after he had surgery for lung cancer.

About 500,000 people gathered for Mass at Pampas de Pimentel, a desert park just outside of Peru's fourth-largest city, according to estimates from the Vatican, while another million lined his motorcade route.

"As I look at your faces, a prayer of thanksgiving to the Lord arises in my heart for the blessing you have been and continue to be in my life," he told the crowds, thanking them for their support during his recovery.

"What a joy it is to return to Chiclayo," he said at the start of his homily, to cheers from a congregation that had waited years for this homecoming — and, in recent weeks, had feared it might never happen.

A city that calls him its own

Before he was elected pope, Leo spent about two decades working in Peru as a missionary priest and served as bishop of Chiclayo, where he is still known as "Padre Roberto", from 2015 to 2023. His image is ubiquitous in the coastal city of about 620,000 people, and his return was treated less like a state visit than like the homecoming of a favourite son.

In Chiclayo, Leo earned a reputation for staying close to poor communities during times of crisis, including when the region was hit with devastating floods and the COVID-19 pandemic. That record is the reason the city claims him so fiercely, and why the crowds that greeted him were so large.

Some had camped overnight to see him, while others walked in the hot sun to avoid bumper-to-bumper traffic to get to the open-air Mass. As he rode in his popemobile, people in the crowd waved yellow and white Vatican flags and shouted, "The pope is from Chiclayo."

Originally from Chicago and formerly known as Robert Francis Prevost, Leo also holds Peruvian citizenship and declared the country his homeland on Wednesday. The declaration was a formal acknowledgement of a bond that Peruvians have felt since the day of his election, when crowds in Chiclayo celebrated through the night.

One month after surgery

The visit comes exactly one month after Leo underwent surgery for lung cancer, amid fears that the trip would have to be cancelled. Doctors have said the cancer was localised, had not spread, and would not require further treatment.

The timing gave the homecoming an added emotional weight. The crowds in Chiclayo were not only welcoming back their former bishop; they were welcoming back a man whose health had been a cause of public anxiety only weeks earlier, and whose recovery they had prayed for in the churches he once led.

His appearance in the open-air Mass, standing and preaching to a crowd of half a million in the desert heat, was itself a statement about his condition. Vatican officials have been careful not to overstate the speed of his recovery, but the scale of the programme he is undertaking in Peru — with eight events scheduled in the Chiclayo area alone — suggests a pope determined to show that he is back at work.

The gratitude he expressed at the Mass was directed at the people who had sustained him through the illness. For many in the crowd, the feeling was mutual: they had prayed for his recovery, and now he had come back to thank them in person.

The final stop of a 12-day tour

Peru is the final stop of his 12-day, three-country South America tour, coming after visits to Argentina and Uruguay. Approximately 12 million people have come to see him at public events so far, a figure that testifies to the scale of the welcome the first pope with deep roots in the region has received.

Leo will stay in the Chiclayo area until Sunday, leading eight events, including a private dinner with the priests he oversaw during his time as bishop. The dinner, away from the cameras, is perhaps the most personal item on the schedule: a reunion with the clergy who worked alongside him for eight years.

For the Vatican, the tour has been a demonstration of the pope's appeal in a continent where the Catholic Church faces competition from evangelical churches and from secularism. For the people of Chiclayo, it has been something simpler — the return of Padre Roberto, a month after surgery, to the city that still calls him its own.