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Pope Leo XIV spent his last morning in Argentina on Wednesday inside Devoto prison in Buenos Aires, where Pope Francis used to wash inmates’ feet on Holy Thursday when he was the city’s archbishop. Three men told Leo how drugs and crime had nearly swallowed their lives, and when they finished, he walked over and held each of them.
The prison’s chaplain broke down at the microphone a few minutes later.
By midafternoon, after a farewell Mass for some two million people at the national shrine of Luján, Leo had boarded an Aerolíneas Argentinas jet for Peru. From the plane, he posted a message that Argentines spent the rest of the day passing to one another:
“I thank God for all I lived during my visit to Argentina, the cradle of our dear Pope Francis. Thank you for welcoming me with such affection; I have felt at home. That is why you can say that from now on this country has two popes: one who was born here and another by adoption.”
Francis never came home during the twelve years of his papacy. His American successor gave Argentina four days and chose to end them among the men most of the country would rather forget.
“A new life is possible”
Devoto is closing. Authorities moved about 1,400 inmates to Marcos Paz over the past month, the Buenos Aires Herald reports, and only about 75 men chosen from the prison’s religious programs stayed behind to receive the pope. They sat in matching white shirts in the gymnasium, facing a statue of the Virgin of Luján that Francis gave them as archbishop.
Leo left the building’s darker past unspoken. During the 1976–1983 dictatorship, Devoto held political prisoners, and in 1978 sixty-five inmates died in what the junta called a riot. A federal court ruled last year that a guards’ crackdown caused the fire that killed them, the Associated Press reports.
Cristian, 29, told the pope that he had found his way back to faith in the prison chapel. “There I felt I was not alone, that Jesus was with me,” he said. A second inmate, Maximiliano, also spoke. Reinaldo, 44, once served time in the same building and now lives free (he told Leo he is a better father and son for it), and his message was simple: “A new life is possible.”
Leo applauded them and embraced each man in turn. Then he made Reinaldo’s words his own. “I hope that all of us, myself included, can carry this message in our hearts: a new life is possible,” he said. “It is the hope we need.”
EWTN’s cameras caught what came next. Leo worked his way down the rows of white shirts, blessing the rosaries men held out to him and pulling some of them into his arms, and one inmate wept openly as he passed.
In his address, Leo told the men that their time behind bars “can become an opportunity to begin your lives anew,” and he warned against the false power of drugs and “easy money.” To the ministers and guards in the room, he added that “visiting prisoners is a work of mercy to which all of us are called.”
“Somos hijos amados”
The prison’s chaplain, Fr. Matías De Martini, rose next to thank him. For several seconds he could not begin; he stood with a hand pressed to his face while the gymnasium waited.
“Your visit to the prison reminds us once again that God gives up on no one,” he said when he found his voice. “Thank you, because in your presence we feel the embrace of the Father, an embrace that makes no distinction for the past, an embrace that reminds us of our dignity, which nothing and no one can take away. We are beloved children.”
De Martini then gave Leo gifts made behind bars around the country, including a stole sewn in a prison and a book of messages from inmates and volunteers. He told the Associated Press about a question Francis asked himself every time he walked into a jail: “Why them and not me?”
Leo has now carried that question into prisons on three continents in seven months, from a rainstorm at Bata prison in Equatorial Guinea in April to a Barcelona penitentiary in June, after closing the Jubilee year with a plea for clemency.
“Argentina, rise up and walk!”
At Luján, wearing vestments in the blue and white of the Argentine flag, Leo celebrated Mass before a crowd the Vatican estimated at about two million. He preached on “processes of forgiveness and reconciliation” in a country bitterly divided under President Javier Milei, and he closed the homily with a command that echoes Peter at the Temple gate in the Acts of the Apostles: “Argentina, rise up and walk!”
Before the final blessing, Leo said goodbye in Spanish.
“The image of the Virgin of Luján that is with us today came to this land in an oxcart and did not want to go any farther. She stayed with you forever,” he said. “The Successor of Peter must continue his mission today in other places, wherever the Lord sends him, but he wants to tell you that he carries all of you in his heart.” He ended, to a long ovation, with “¡Hasta siempre, mi querida Argentina!”
At Ezeiza airport, Milei walked Leo to the stairs of the plane and appeared to fight back tears as they shook hands. This is the president who once called Francis “the representative of evil on Earth.”
A pope by adoption
Read Leo’s farewell closely, and you notice how little it claims. It hands Francis the birth and settles for adoption, the standing of a guest who knows whose house he has been staying in.
He kept that house the way its son would have wanted. He told disabled residents in Claypole that their lives are no burden, and reminded Milei’s government that private property carries a “social mortgage.” In Córdoba he revived Francis’s call to make a mess, and his last stop before Mass was a jail.
In Matthew’s Gospel, Christ counts the prisoner among the people he will ask us about at the end: “I was in prison and you visited me.” Back home, this fall gave American Catholics a botched execution in Tennessee and a Catholic governor who emptied California’s death row, and both stories turn on Francis’s question. If the honest answer to “why them and not me?” is grace, then no one in a white prison shirt is beyond the reach of the God who keeps looking for them.
Leo lands tonight in Lima, in the country where he served for two decades as a missionary and bishop and where he holds citizenship. Peru has called him its own for years. As of Wednesday, Argentina does too.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV and with the chaplains and families who keep walking through prison gates, convinced that a person is more than the worst thing he has done.
Our politics rewards contempt. It sells the idea that some people are disposable and asks Christians to cheer when the state is cruel to them. Leo answered that on Wednesday without a single word about politics, by sitting with 75 men in a gymnasium and holding the ones who told him the truth about their lives.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for a faith that looks like that, one that visits the prisoner and refuses, as Fr. De Martini put it, to give up on anyone.
If you believe this movement matters, Catholics and people of goodwill standing for the dignity of every person, including those behind bars, I am asking you to join us.
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Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.
In 1987, I wrote my Vows of Poverty as part of my own preparation for full-time missionary life serving through the United Methodist Church. Thank you for permitting me to read your news and participate in receiving spiritual nurture from you all as followers of Jesus whom I also follow. May we encourage one another. I thank our Lord for the Leader of your Church family. May Padre be a spiritual guide in the Global Context. Amen.
Prayers for Pope Leo's health and safety.