Leo XIV had been pope for just a week when the former Robert Prevost confided to one of his old secretaries that he wanted to go back home to visit, home being Chiclayo.

Father Bob may have grown up in the Chicago suburbs but it’s in this unassuming Peruvian city, nestled in the northern coastal agricultural belt and outside the main tourist circuit, that the young Augustinian priest capped an intensive pastoral journey in his adopted country, one that eventually would take him all the way to the seat of St. Peter in Rome.

There’s almost no one in Peru’s fifth-largest city who doesn’t have a story about Monsignor Robert, as Leo was then known. Some proudly show photos of the pope confirming their children or nephews. Others recall how much he loved to drive way too fast across Peru’s rugged north.

“If he hadn’t become pope, I think he would have been a Formula One driver,” joked Eduard Montoya, who runs a restaurant next to the cathedral where he says Prevost used to stop for breakfast to eat marinated pork.

Being a pope in the modern era comes with many obligations to a flock of more than a billion Catholics, from how to reconcile 2,000-years-worth of tradition with a rapidly changing society hooked to technology, to choosing when to wade into politics when the target of criticism is a thin-skinned U.S. president.

In contrast to Francis, his predecessor, Leo is deliberate and measured in his choice of words. It was in Peru, a country he came to love and even took citizenship in, where he honed his people skills first as a missionary in Chulucanas, then finally as bishop in Chiclayo.

That’s why Leo’s trip to Latin America, covering 19,000 miles in 11 days, isn’t just any old homecoming, according to Father Jasson Sempertegui, who managed Prevost’s agenda for four years in Chiclayo. He’s been sketching it out almost from day one as pope.

A year and a half later, even after a last-minute surgery for lung cancer briefly cast doubt he would make it over, Leo lands in Uruguay on Friday to kick off his first official trip to Latin America as pope. He’ll then give Argentines the papal visit they waited for but never got from Francis, who as pontiff never returned to his native nation, where he remains a controversial figure to this day.

Peru is saved for last. Leo will dedicate the longest and most personal leg to a country where he spent 20 formative years in multiple stints, only leaving in 2023. Leo has said his time there shaped his life more than anything else.

People in Chiclayo still remember the special shout-out Leo gave them in Spanish from the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica in his first words as pope, just after his surprise election.

Last month, when Leo announced he needed surgery to remove a lung nodule, churches across Peru, a predominantly Catholic country of 34 million, called on people to pray for him. President Keiko Fujimori herself attended mass that same day with several ministers.

But nowhere were the prayers for recovery more intense than in Chiclayo, outside the yellow cathedral overlooking one of the city’s main squares where Monsignor Prevost used to deliver his homilies in a Spanish that over the years sounded less and less American.

About 40 primary-school girls played religious music as adults arrived after work, some carrying sleeping children in their arms, and recited 50 Hail Marys. In the square today looms a metal pergola with golden letters reading ‘Chiclayo, City of Pope Leo XIV.’

Their prayers were answered, and this part of the tour will give the deepest insights into Leo’s character and perhaps offer some clues into how he plans to carry the papacy into the 21st century as he, at the age of 71, grows more assertive in the job.

Timely visit

Sempertegui first heard about the pope’s plans to visit the region back in May last year, when he was visiting his old boss in Rome. Some things, he noted, had stayed unchanged.

Monsignor Robert was still down for a hang, like back in the day, when they played tennis in their spare time in Chiclayo and, after dinner, they watched shows like Prison Break andVikings with other priests.

But over the 18 months as pope, it became clear that the pontiff once referred to as the Quiet American had found his voice as a spiritual leader.

“There will be some political message,” said Sempertegui in an interview. “Though he won’t directly point the finger at anyone.”

That’s become Leo’s signature style: understated but unequivocal.

The mild-mannered Midwestern was an unlikely adversary for Donald Trump, but when the U.S. entered a war with Israel against Iran, Leo decided to step into the fray. In their back and forth in April, it was Leo who emerged the winner in the stage of public opinion and among Christians.

As history’s first American pope, Leo is learning to flex more and more his political muscle. He voted in the U.S. midterms, an election that delivered a stinging rebuke to the president, just before heading to a part of the world that Trump considers his exclusive sphere of influence.

The pope’s visit, in fact, couldn’t be more timely for another clash.

Trump is pushing to strengthen Washington’s influence in Latin America, finding allies within a bigger cast of right-wing leaders, from Peru’s Fujimori to Argentina’s Javier Milei. Yet a conservative sweep of the region was stopped when Brazil’s leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva prevailed over MAGA-inspired Flávio Bolsonaro.

Into this new, charged political climate enters Leo.

Both Fujimori, a Catholic, and Milei, who was raised Catholic but has increasingly embraced Judaism, are enthusiastically rolling out the welcome mat for him. Yet their tougher lines on migration and Iran sit uneasily with the pope’s anti-war message and calls for migrants and refugees to be treated humanely.

Still, Leo is expected to arrive as pastor first, trying to steer clear of the polemics and off-the-cuff wisecracks that often followed Francis.

Here forever

In Peru, many hope Leo will speak to problems he knows firsthand, such as El Niño. Locals remember him wading through flooded streets in rain boots to deliver aid during unusual weather and riding mules to reach remote communities.

“He never sat still,” said Janinna Nataly Sesa, the former director of Caritas Chiclayo, who worked closely with Prevost. “He was close to everyone.”

In Chiclayo, preparations to host the pope have gone into overdrive and set the regional government back more 40 million soles ($11.6 million), Governor Jorge Luis Pérez estimated. “This is the pope’s home,” he said.

Juan Manuel Scander, a textile businessman who heads the regional chamber of commerce, says the city exudes a sense of pride and there are more people in churches. Along the city’s packed commercial streets, small shops and street vendors sell pope T-shirts, magnets and ice creams. At one stall, illustrated Bibles sell on credit for about half Peru’s monthly minimum wage.

Local authorities expect at least 1 million visitors during Leo’s two days in and around Chiclayo, potentially bringing record tourism in the region and an economic boost of at least $200 million. The city’s roughly 25,000 hotel beds are already close to full and some residents are preparing to rent double rooms with breakfast for $100 a night.

Across northern Peru, artists have painted murals and built sculptures of the pope, while local governments have been paving streets and refurbishing churches. Officials are also racing to prepare a sprawling private plot for the pope’s mass after unexploded munitions were found at the original site, a former military firing range.

Leo will spend his two nights in the city inside a simple building, the same place he used to live with a group of priests after Francis appointed him in 2014 to lead the diocese. By then, Prevost already knew northern Peru well from his earlier missionary work with the Augustinians in the 1980s and 1990s, amid Peru’s bloody internal conflict.

Over the decades he was in the country, Prevost made victims of abuse by once-powerful Sodalitium of Christian Life society feel heard. He opened makeshift shelters and turned churches into soup kitchens when thousands of Venezuelans were fleeing economic collapse and spilling over the border.

During the coronavirus pandemic, he helped raise money for two oxygen plants and for a meal program for struggling families in Zaña, a small town with Afro-Peruvian roots about an hour’s drive from Chiclayo.

Leo will revisit Zaña next week. As bishop, he used to travel there in April for the feast of Santo Toribio de Mogrovejo, a 16th-century missionary archbishop he held up as a model for his own ministry. A prayer gathering in Zaña will be his last event in the region he came to call home.

“I think at some point in his life he thought he would stay here forever,” said Sempertegui, his former secretary.

Prevost would say he already had his place in the crypt where Chiclayo’s bishops are buried, he recalled.

“He thought he would die here.”

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