Pope Leo XIV returned Wednesday to the country where he spent two decades as a missionary and bishop, and he did not come with soft words. In three addresses delivered in a single morning — to Peru’s bishops, to priests and religious inside Lima’s cathedral, and then to some 40,000 faithful packed into the Plaza Mayor — the pope called the Catholic Church to account for clerical abuse, denounced what he called “the persistence of a machista mentality,” and urged Peruvians not to surrender to poverty, addiction, or domestic violence. “Do not give up in the face of difficulties,” he told the crowd in the Plaza Mayor, speaking in the easy, familiar register of someone who knows the place. Three million people had lined the streets of Lima the previous day to greet him. Inside the cathedral, whose walls hold the tomb of Saint Turibius of Mogrovejo — the 16th-century archbishop Leo has repeatedly invoked Read More…

Pope Leo XIV calls Church to accountability in Lima homecoming