Why this Peruvian town is celebrating Pope Leo XIV as one of their own: Reporter's notebook
CHICLAYO, PERU -- Pope Leo XIV might be "gringo" by birth but ask the people from Chiclayo, Peru, and the man is decidedly Peruvian. A sampling of Friday's local headlines:
From Peru 21: "The Native Pope."
From Correo: "From Chiclayo to the Vatican."
From Ojo: "The Pope is Peruvian and He Misses Ceviche."
The 69-year-old Robert Prevost served in Peru for over two decades, including as bishop of the northwestern city of Chiclayo, a role he was appointed to in 2014 by the late Pope Francis.
Restaurants around town proudly write "The Pope ate here." One owner serves me Leo's favorite dish…goat with beans and rice (delicious).
There's a huge banner draped on city hall with Papa Leon's picture on it.
At a nearby church where the now pope once held mass, an elderly member of the congregation told me she yelled out in joy when she saw him elected.
"I started to cry" she said, adding that he would do so much for this town. Chiclayo and its surrounding suburbs are not rich areas. People work for everything they have here.
If the new pope is humble and close to the lives of the working poor, it is in this part of the world he learned that empathy. The pope said it as much himself.
"The people of Peru taught me what it means to walk with the poor, to accompany others in their struggles and their joy," he said in 2024.
Stop me if you've heard this before: A religious missionary goes to a more impoverished country for a few months, builds a couple houses and goes back telling everyone they're "changed" by the experience. It's the kind of poverty tourism a lot of people in lower income countries often come to resent.
This is where Pope Leo was apparently different.
Other missionaries come and go, we're told, but Leo stayed, for a few decades. He showed up during birthdays and funerals. He ate at local restaurants, he learned the language, he took his ministry out of the church and into the streets. He helped procure oxygen supplies during the pandemic.
The people here respected that. They say he earned it.
This mild-mannered guy from the Chicago suburbs has improbably captured the hearts of this part of northwest Peru in a major way.
"I feel in his heart he's more Latino than gringo," long-time friend Father Jorge Antonio Millán Cotrina told me, laughing. He texted then-Cardinal Prevost the day before the conclave and said he'd be thinking of him, that anything could happen in a conclave.
The cardinal thanked him for his prayers, no idea he was about to become the leader of the Catholic Church.
