Pope Leo XIV arrived in Buenos Aires on Sunday, marking the first papal visit to Argentina in nearly four decades — the first since Pope John Paul II’s trip in 1987.
President Javier Milei and his sister, presidential secretary Karina Milei, greeted the pope at Jorge Newbery airport, amid growing tensions between the government and Argentina’s Catholic Church over Milei’s austerity programmes.
In his first public address in the country, Leo offered a pointed counter to the libertarian president’s free-market agenda: “The economy must serve the person, not the person the economy,” he told leaders in Buenos Aires, urging policies that benefit “the unemployed, retirees and all those who, despite hard work, nonetheless struggle to meet their household’s needs”.
The pope also encouraged an economic agenda that “stimulates private initiative”, and told officials: “Authority is most authentic when it is exercised as service,” adding that those in authority have a duty to act with prudence, acknowledge the limits of their power and direct their decisions toward the good of the whole community.
He called for greater state investment in education and vocational training, and said: “A nation must seriously ask itself where it has failed when its young people have to leave their homeland in order to make their dreams come true.” He described Argentina’s democracy as “a part of Argentina’s heritage that needs to be safeguarded”.
Under Milei, Argentina’s government slashed public spending to combat inflation and eliminate the fiscal deficit, rolling back subsidies, loosening regulations and pursuing privatisation of state-owned companies. The government has delivered a budget surplus and reduced inflation, but real wages remain lower than when Milei took office and about 300,000 formal jobs have been lost since the reforms began.
Argentina is the second stop on Leo’s 12-day, three-country tour of Latin America, which began with three days in Uruguay. He is scheduled to visit a prison and celebrate mass in Buenos Aires, Lujan and the province of Cordoba, before leaving for Peru on Wednesday.
Leo’s predecessor Pope Francis, the first pope from the Americas, was born in Buenos Aires in 1936 but never visited Argentina as head of the Catholic Church; he died in 2025.
Source: Al Jazeera
