Pope Leo leaves Uruguay and heads to most fraught stop of his tour in Milei’s Argentina

Pope Leo XIV wrapped up his visit to Uruguay on Sunday by praising the women who have passed the Catholic faith on to younger generations, as he highlighted the role the church has played since the founding of Latin America’s most secular country.

The pope travelled to the city of Florida, north of Montevideo, to mark an important Catholic feast day before heading to Argentina for the second leg of his South American tour. It is expected to be the most politically delicate stop, given the Catholic Church’s sharp criticisms of the austerity programme of libertarian President Javier Milei.

For his final event in Uruguay, Leo celebrated the feast of the Virgin of the Thirty-three. According to tradition, 33 independence patriots acquired the Guarani statue and had it with them when independence was declared from the Brazilian empire in Florida on August 25, 1825.

Leo became the first pope in nearly four decades to visit Uruguay, in hopes of reminding its people that the Catholic Church is part of their very identity as a nation – even if, in subsequent decades, the country went on a deeply secular, and at times anticlerical, route.

In his homily, delivered in front of Florida’s cathedral, Leo recalled the presence of the statue at the time of independence in reminding Uruguayans that “the history of peoples, too, cannot be fully understood without reference to God”, and especially a mother.

He thanked all the mothers and grandmothers who have passed the faith on to younger generations, and acknowledged their pain when their efforts did not stick.

“You taught your children to pray and today they no longer do so. You used to attend mass together and it has been years since they entered a church,” Leo said. But he urged them to not despair.

“Mothers and grandmothers: never tire of passing on the faith!”

Tens of thousands of people packed Florida’s main square for the mass under brilliant blue skies, some walking for several kilometres to reach the site. The city has a population of about 40,000 but the Vatican estimated 50,000 were on hand.

Fiama Pirez, an English professor, travelled from Montevideo for the mass even though she could have seen Leo in the capital. She said she preferred a family outing to Florida so her mother could fulfil a dream to see a pope.

“I’m religious in my own way and although I never strayed far from the Catholic faith, I’m rediscovering it today,” she said.

In Buenos Aires, Milei is expected to greet Leo at the airport before the two appear together for the traditional welcome ceremony and exchange of speeches. The Catholic Church has criticised Milei’s austerity measures that have slashed social spending and his embrace of artificial intelligence.

Milei has staked his presidency on cutting social spending to overhaul Argentina’s troubled economy and deliver a long-elusive budget surplus. He has called social justice “an aberration” that amounts to stealing, and mocked as “huge stupidity” the increasingly common complaint in Argentina that families squeezed by his austerity programme cannot make it to the end of the month.

Leo, who took his name from the 19th-century pope whose encyclical on labour laid the foundation of Catholic social teaching, has made the poor and vulnerable a focus of his papacy, carrying on the legacy of his Argentine predecessor, Pope Francis.

Posters reading “At last, a Lion who unites” appeared across Buenos Aires this weekend, a jab playing on the pope’s name in Spanish – León, or lion – and the lion imagery Milei often uses to portray himself on social media.

“Argentina is a society currently experiencing significant upheaval, deep polarisation, and an economic crisis, along with a president who defies conventional protocol – a leader who, at one point, even challenged Pope Francis,” said Luis Bahamondes, a professor at the Centre for Judaic Studies at the University of Chile.

Since taking office in December 2023, Milei has slashed Argentina’s healthcare budget by 48 per cent in real terms. Planned cuts to the public university system, which represents a near-universal point of pride in the crisis-prone country, sent students into the streets.

According to official data, poverty in Argentina reached 32.3 per cent of the population during the first half of 2026, representing about 15 million people.

Much like its allies in the Trump administration, Milei’s government has portrayed the cuts as part of a necessary reform process to remake Argentina’s troubled economy and eliminate fraud and waste in the federal bureaucracy.

Like Trump, Milei has also courted artificial intelligence investment and data centres with promises of limited regulation. Leo has warned that the AI race poses threats to humanity and the environment and called for strict, internationally policed safeguards on its development.

Milei’s government insists the papal trip is purely religious. “The pope belongs to all Argentines. He doesn’t belong to a political party or a political camp,” Karina Milei, the president’s sister and secretary general of the presidency, told reporters after a recent planning meeting for Leo’s visit with church leaders.

In Argentina, Leo is completing unfinished business left by Francis. The Argentine Jesuit, the former archbishop of Buenos Aires, never returned home during his 12-year pontificate, confounding friends and foes alike.

“There’s a lot of disagreement over Francis and his legacy in Argentina,” said David Lantigua, a theology professor and faculty fellow at the University of Notre Dame’s Kellogg Institute, which focuses especially on Latin American affairs.

Much of the polemics stems from his tenure in Buenos Aires, when the former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was a slum priest who advocated for the poorest and most marginalised – the sector of Argentines feeling Milei’s social spending cuts the most.

“I think we’ll see that kind of tension with Leo – that’s the ministry Francis left behind,” Lantigua said.

Leo, who spent two decades as a missionary priest in Peru ministering to poor people, is very much a pastor in Francis’ image and owes his pontificate to the late pope. But unlike Francis, he is returning home to Peru on the last leg of this trip, visiting a country where he spent two decades as a missionary.

Argentina’s state intelligence agency said on Saturday that a person had been arrested over death threats against Leo ahead of his arrival. A federal court in Campana, some 70km (45 miles) northwest of Buenos Aires, ordered the arrest less than 24 hours after the agency was tipped off, it said, without elaborating.