The walls in Chiclayo have been painted with colourful murals and banners welcoming Pope Leo XIV, but he is better known to residents of this city in northern Peru as “Padre Roberto” – a pastor who walked their streets, shared their love of local cuisine, and stood by them through natural disasters and the Covid-19 pandemic.

Robert Prevost, 71, who spent nearly a decade as the bishop here until he left in 2023, now returns as the Catholic church’s most powerful figure. Yet for the city’s faithful he remains humble and approachable, the characteristics that first endeared him to them.

Prevost is not only the first pope from the United States, he is also the first to hold citizenship in Peru, and he has set aside six days to visit it on the final leg of an 11-day South American trip that passed through Uruguay and Argentina.

Prevost, though born in Chicago, has been coming and going from Peru for four decades, spending about 20 years of his pastoral life in his fervently Catholic adopted nation beginning in 1985, when the 29-year-old Augustinian missionary arrived in Chulucanas, a poor town in the far north of the country.

To say Peruvians are delighted at his return visit as pope is an understatement. Tens of thousands lined the streets of Lima as Leo’s cavalcade drove him from the airport to the presidential palace on Wednesday. After Chiclayo, he travels to the Andean town of Santa Cruz; the African-Peruvian town of Zaña; Cusco, the one-time Inca capital; and Pucallpa, a city in the Peruvian Amazon, before returning to Lima.

“This visit is like a big party,” said José Luis Pérez Guadalupe, a theologian and professor at Lima’s Pacific University. “Peruvians want to celebrate their first ever pope.”

It seems clear that for Pope Leo, it is an emotional reunion, too. When he made his inaugural speech from the balcony overlooking St Peter’s Square in May 2025, he switched from Italian to Spanish in order to mention his former diocese in Chiclayo.

Pope Leo XIV greets a child at the airport in Callao, Peru, on 11 November 2026. Photograph: EyePress News/Shutterstock

“He was a man of action, not just words,” recalls Yolanda Díaz, 72, who worked closely with Prevost in the Chiclayo diocese. “It was really hard to see him just sitting down. He was always walking around with his shoes covered in dust.”

He is particularly remembered for his work during the Covid-19 pandemic. He did not just deliver food aid, but gave last rites to victims – of which Peru had some of the highest figures per capita, with more than 219,000 deaths – at a time when funeral gatherings were banned due to the perceived risk of contagion. When victims were dying in the streets and even in hospitals due to a lack of oxygen, he raised $380,000 though the Catholic charity Caritas to buy two oxygen plants.

“When aid needed to be delivered to remote areas, he would be in the helicopter, taking it himself. He wasn’t just giving orders,” Díaz said. “He would always talk to you face-to-face, never from behind a desk or a pulpit. He knew how to listen, discuss and then resolve any issue.”

Prevost appointed Díaz to lead the diocese’s commission on human mobility and human trafficking to deal with the influx of destitute migrant families, many of whom had walked and hitchhiked from Venezuela in 2018 at the height of that country’s hyperinflation crisis. About 20,000 passed through Chiclayo, and 3,500 families settled in the region, according to the commission. Peru received 1.6 million migrants, the second-highest number after Colombia. Overall, about 7 million Venezuelans, a third of the population, has migrated mostly within Latin America.

The faithful greet Pope Leo XIV as he arrives for a meeting with Peru’s bishops at the archbishop’s residence in Lima, Peru, on 12 November 2026. Photograph: Martín Mejía/AP

Díaz led efforts to establish Venezuelans’ legal status so they could work, access housing and schooling for their children. Some Venezuelans joined the commission, too, including Lisbeth Díaz, a school teacher who arrived in Chiclayo in August 2018 with two children. She helped to organise soup kitchens that Prevost promoted to assist migrants and combat human trafficking.

“Without the church we would have been lost, but we had such great support,” she said. “To me, he was – and continues to be – a person who radiates great peace and serenity. He is a very peaceful person, deeply committed to those most in need, to the poor.”

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Despite the festive atmosphere, Vatican sources indicate that Pope Leo will seek private meetings with victims of clerical abuse, amid criticism that his public agenda was manipulated by conservative sectors of the church in Peru to avoid such potentially uncomfortable encounters.

Last week, Bishop Accountability, a US-based NGO, published a list of 77 Peruvian priests, brothers and lay members accused of sexual abuse and pederasty, as part of its global database. Pope Francis, Leo’s predecessor, dissolved the Peru-based Catholic movement Sodalitium over its abuses in 2025, but elements linked to the powerful organisation continue to harass the journalists behind the investigation that led to its downfall.

Camila Bustamante, a Chilean journalist who published a book denouncing abuses in a female arm of Sodalitium, said she was surprised to receive an invitation to meet Pope Leo in Lima. “I hope he listens and takes this information and does something with it,” she said.

People cheer as a statue of Pope Leo XIV is installed in a park in Callao, Peru, on 6 November 2026. Photograph: Guadalupe Pardo/AP

Silvia Alayo, who worked with Prevost at Peru’s Episcopal Commission on Social Action, said she was disappointed such meetings had not been made priorities but she believed Leo would follow the example of the late Pope Francis with a “no tolerance” stance on abuse.

“I believe in his commitment to truth and justice,” she added, insisting that victims must receive reparations from the church.

The pope’s more immediate concern may be getting through his gruelling schedule following an operation to remove the lower lobe of his right lung after a cancer diagnosis a month ago. Doctors have since given him the all clear.

“In the past, there was an unwritten rule that there would never be a pope from the US due to its dominant hegemonic power,” said Pérez Guadalupe. But Prevost’s “talent for listening and dialogue” helped the conclave not see Prevost as just a US candidate, but also a Latin American pontiff. “Peru made Pope Leo who he is. Now he has returned to his roots.”