SANTA CRUZ DE SUCCHABAMBA, Peru (The Thursday Times) — Pope Leo XIV flew by helicopter on Saturday to Santa Cruz de Succhabamba, an Andean town he once reached on horseback as a missionary priest, and told an open-air Mass there that injustice cannot be overcome by brutality.
About 20,000 people came to the Mass in the town of about 6,000, which sits more than 2,000 metres above sea level among green peaks. Many had camped out overnight or walked mountain paths from surrounding villages, and a local band welcomed him singing “Pope Leo, welcome home.”
“Selfishness, injustice and evil are not overcome by brutality, but by prayer, patience and perseverance in denouncing what is wrong, by making our pleas with determination and working diligently to bring about the necessary changes,” the pope said.
Speaking at his former cathedral in Chiclayo, where he was bishop from 2015 to 2023, Leo said Peruvians felt “threatened by the uncertainty of widespread violence and by the unspeakable suffering that continues to afflict so many of our brothers and sisters.”
Peru’s homicide rate has nearly doubled in five years, from 5.8 to 10.7 per 100,000 people, and reported extortion cases rose from 2,421 in 2019 to 26,734 in 2025, according to official figures. President Keiko Fujimori, who took office in July promising to tackle crime, has since declared states of emergency, including in Lima in August.
Emptying villages
The pope also spoke of “the suffering of those who are forced to leave their homeland in search of a better future” in coastal cities such as Lima and Trujillo, and of “declining birth rates that are emptying villages.” More than 40% of people in the Cajamarca region, where Santa Cruz lies, live in poverty, the highest rate in Peru, according to official data, and about 729,000 people born there now live elsewhere in the country.
The trip comes a month after the 71-year-old pope underwent surgery for cancer. Jorge Villegas, vicar general of the Diocese of Chiclayo, said Leo had wanted to add a stop in Incahuasi, a Quechua-speaking town higher still, where he celebrated Mass in 2023, but that getting him there as pope “proved somewhat complicated.”
Born in Chicago as Robert Francis Prevost, Leo holds both US and Peruvian citizenship and spent about two decades in Peru as a missionary priest and bishop. He arrived in Peru this week from Argentina, and told the country’s bishops the Church must make amends for abuse. He travels on Sunday to Cuzco and to Pucallpa, where he will meet Indigenous representatives, and ends his tour of Uruguay, Argentina, and Peru on Monday with a visit to a shelter for elderly people.
