Milei Welcomes Pope Leo XIV on First Papal Visit to Argentina in Nearly Four Decades

Argentine President Javier Milei welcomed Pope Leo XIV at Buenos Aires’s Jorge Newbery International Airport on Sunday, 8 November. Milei and his sister, presidential secretary Karina Milei, greeted the pope, marking the first papal visit to the country in nearly four decades. The visit comes amid growing tensions between the government and Argentina’s Catholic Church over the government’s austerity programmes.

In his first public address in the Latin American country, Leo, 71, offered a pointed response to the libertarian president’s free-market agenda. “The economy must serve the person, not the person the economy,” he told leaders in the Argentine capital.

While the pontiff encouraged an economic agenda that “stimulates private initiative,” he also urged policies that benefit “the unemployed, retirees and all those who, despite hard work, nonetheless struggle to meet their household’s needs.” His emphasis on people who have little public voice in economic debates reflects a concern for the vulnerable (Proverbs 31:8-9).

Argentina is the second stop on Leo’s 12-day, three-country tour of Latin America, which began with three days in Uruguay. In Argentina, the pope attended a welcome ceremony at Plaza San Martín and met Milei at the Casa Rosada, the official presidential palace. He is also scheduled to visit a prison and celebrate Mass in Buenos Aires, Luján and the province of Córdoba before leaving for Peru on Wednesday. His visit is the first by a pontiff since the trip of the late Pope John Paul II in 1987.

The visit takes place against a backdrop of shrinking membership in the Catholic Church in Latin America. Catholics remain the largest religious group in the region, with as many as 425 million people identifying with the church. The overall population, however, has shrunk over the last decade. A Pew Research Center survey found that the share of self-identifying Catholics in Argentina fell from 71 percent in 2013-2014 to 58 percent a decade later.

Milei has said he considered converting to Judaism, although he was raised in the Catholic faith. Political tensions between his government and the Church have also emerged in recent years. The president had a notably contentious relationship with Leo’s predecessor, Pope Francis, who was born in Buenos Aires in 1936. Even before winning the presidency in 2023 with a dark-horse campaign, Milei had drawn headlines for denouncing Francis on topics ranging from taxation to social programmes. He was known to call the late pontiff a “communist” and an “imbecile who defends social justice.” Francis was the first pope from the Americas, but he never visited Argentina as head of the Church. He died in 2025.

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