Pope will retrace his missionary footsteps in Peru and finally visit Argentina in November

ROME (AP) — Pope Leo XIV will retrace his steps as a missionary priest when he returns to Peru in November in his longest trip to date that will also take him to Uruguay and Argentina, where his Argentine predecessor Pope Francis never returned.

The Vatican on Monday published the detailed itinerary for Leo's first visit to Latin America as pope. The Nov. 6-17 trip will be a homecoming for the U.S.-born pontiff who also has Peruvian citizenship and spent two decades there as a priest and bishop.

As he showed during his four-nation Africa trip in April, the 71-year-old Leo has no qualms about covering vast distances and working late into the night when he's on the road. In all, he'll clock just over 31,000 kilometers (19,000 miles) of flight time during the trip, nearly double the 17,000 km (10,000 miles) he traveled in Algeria, Cameroon, Angola and Equatorial Guinea.

The visit begins in Uruguay, whose secular identity is so deeply rooted that Christmas is officially Family Day and Holy Week is Tourism Week. His itinerary includes a stop at a parish in Casavalle, a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of the capital plagued by drug trafficking and gang violence.

The Uruguay stop will also put Leo in place to mark an important Catholic feast day Nov. 8, associated with the country's patron saint, Our Lady of the Thirty-Three.

After Uruguay, Leo arrives in Argentina where government officials said Monday they expect 7 million people to turn out. Francis, who died in 2025, confounded friends and foes alike by never returning to his native land, after he left for Rome for the 2013 conclave that elected him pope.

He had been a divisive figure back home, both as Jesuit superior and archbishop of Buenos Aires, and apparently wanted to avoid fueling the country's polemics by not giving the ruling party at any given time the political benefits that come with a pope visit.

In Buenos Aires, Leo will meet libertarian President Javier Milei, who once called Francis "the representative of evil on Earth." Milei's sweeping spending cuts have strained relations with Argentine church leaders, who have criticized his government for putting economic orthodoxy ahead of the needs of the poor.

On Nov. 9, Leo will visit the Don Orione care home in Claypole, south of Buenos Aires, a Catholic institution founded in 1935 that houses more than 300 people with disabilities. The stop carries political overtones as cuts to disability funding have become a flashpoint in Milei's austerity program.

At a press conference Monday, Argentine officials were asked how Milei's spending cuts squared with the church's emphasis on social justice. Foreign Minister Pablo Quirno said there were "no fundamental differences" between the government and the Catholic Church, citing Milei's opposition to abortion and saying he had cut poverty in half.

Leo will also celebrate his first Mass in Argentina at Buenos Aires' Monumento de los Españoles, where St. John Paul II led prayers on June 12, 1982, during Argentina's war with Britain over the Falkland Islands.