Pope Leo to visit Cusco, former capital of Inca empire
Pope Leo XIV is scheduled to visit Uruguay, Argentina, and Peru shortly after undergoing surgery to remove a cancerous lung tumor. The trip will include Cusco, a historic city in the Peruvian Andes that was once the center of the Inca Empire. Cusco preserves Inca and colonial-era monuments and is a UNESCO World Heritage site; tourism is now a major source of income. Italian missionary Father Walter Corsini described what the Pope can expect to find in Cusco in an interview with Vatican News.
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Pope Leo XIV is scheduled to visit Cusco during a November 6–17 trip to Uruguay, Argentina, and Peru. The stop will highlight the city’s Inca and colonial heritage, as well as the local Church’s work and popular religious traditions.
Located in the Peruvian Andes, Cusco was once the capital of the Inca Empire, which the article says ruled an area of roughly 770,000 square miles. The city is among the oldest continuously inhabited in the Western Hemisphere and preserves monuments from both the Inca and colonial periods; UNESCO recognizes it as a World Heritage site.
Tourism is now one of Cusco’s main sources of income, and the papal visit is expected to bring international attention to the city.
Father Walter Corsini, an Italian missionary and vicar general of the Missionary Servants of the Poor, described poverty in Cusco as including material hardship, limited access to education, and difficulties in family and social life. His congregation seeks to address spiritual poverty and help people find ways to improve their circumstances.
Corsini said the local Church has a distinctive character shaped by successful inculturation and widespread spirituality, expressed particularly through popular devotion. A central event during Leo’s Cusco visit is planned as a meeting with the faithful and representatives of popular devotion at Saqsaywaman National Archaeological Park.
The Church in Cusco has been preparing intensively for the visit. Corsini said he has seen people drawing closer to the Church, even as some Catholics do not practice their faith or attend Protestant groups.
The itinerary includes Montevideo, Buenos Aires, and Lima, along with smaller cities. Leo is also scheduled to celebrate Masses outside the Marian shrines of Our Lady of the Thirty-Three in Uruguay and Our Lady of Luján in Argentina.
In Buenos Aires, the Pope will visit the city where his predecessor, Pope Francis, served as cardinal-archbishop. The trip also includes a return to Chiclayo, Peru, where Leo served as bishop from 2015 to 2023.
The journey is scheduled to proceed after Leo underwent surgery in mid-October to remove a cancerous lung tumor; the article reports that his doctors cleared him for the trip.
Andean Catholicism and the enduring legacy of Indigenous cultures
Andean Catholicism is neither simply a European religion laid over Indigenous societies nor a survival of pre-Christian religion unchanged. It is a Christian faith lived through Andean histories, social bonds, artistic forms, and popular devotions. The Church’s account of this encounter holds together two claims: Indigenous cultures possess genuine human and religious goods that can enrich Christian life, and the Gospel does not merely preserve every inherited belief unchanged—it also tests, purifies, and transforms them in the light of Christ. That balance helps explain both the endurance of Indigenous cultures and the distinctively Catholic character of Andean devotion.
In his 1985 address in Cuzco, Pope John Paul II recognized the depth of Andean religious and cultural inheritance. He recalled that the ancestors of the people before him had worshipped the sun as a source of life, and described Christ as the true “sun of justice and love.” He also connected respect for the earth and the moral teachings expressed in ama sua, ama quella, and ama llulla—not to steal, not to be lazy, and not to lie—with gratitude to God, respect for others, responsibility toward the community, and integrity between word and deed. These are the Pope’s Christian interpretations of Andean traditions: they identify points of contact with the Gospel, not an assertion that Indigenous religious beliefs and Christian doctrine are interchangeable.
The same address insists that conversion need not mean cultural erasure. John Paul II urged pastoral workers to respect local culture and promote what is good in it, while presenting the distinctively Christian message in doctrine and morals. He compared this to Christ’s bringing the Old Law to fulfilment: the Gospel does not simply discard what came before, but brings what is true and good toward its fullness.
That approach is often called inculturation: the Gospel takes root in a people’s culture, and authentic cultural goods find new expression within Christian life. In Bolivia, John Paul II pointed to Indigenous languages, the ayllu—a community of kinship and shared life—and ayni, a tradition of mutual assistance, as well as local legends, folklore, and crafts. He described the encounter between faith and culture as a process in which the Gospel remained the point of reference while shaping a Christian identity expressed in local forms.
One of the most visible legacies of this encounter is Andean popular Catholicism: the faith expressed not only through formal teaching and parish worship, but also through processions, pilgrimages, feasts, images, and community practices. In Peru, John Paul II named devotion to the Lord of Huanca, the Lord of Qoyllur Rit’i, the Virgin of Cocharcas, and the Lord of the Tremors, alongside Corpus Christi celebrations and Marian shrines. He presented these practices as public and communal expressions of Christian faith, shaped over generations.
For the Pope, popular devotion is not merely cultural decoration around a more “real” religion. It can teach the faith, bind families and communities together, sustain people in joy and suffering, and nurture a sense of God’s providence and Christ’s redemption. He also connected it to the dignity of every human person and to the struggle against unjust social structures. In this view, devotion is strongest when it leads toward deeper Christian life and practical fraternity, rather than stopping at outward custom.
The 2007 text in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis likewise describes Indigenous communities as active participants in forming a synthesis between their cultures and the faith preached by missionaries. It identifies love of Christ who suffers, the Eucharistic presence of Christ, and God’s nearness to the poor and suffering as central features of Latin American popular piety. This account presents Andean Catholics not as passive recipients of a finished religious form, but as people whose cultural wisdom helped shape the ways Christian faith was received and lived.
The Church’s language of “seeds of the Word” expresses the belief that truth and goodness found beyond explicit Christian revelation can prepare people to receive the Gospel. John Paul II applied this language to Andean customs and moral traditions, while also saying that they should be strengthened in the light of Christ. The point is not that every element of an ancestral religion is already Christian, but that the Gospel can recognize and bring to fulfilment truths present within a culture.
Pope Leo XIV’s 2025 message to Indigenous peoples makes the same dynamic explicit:
He, who has planted the “seeds of the Word” in all cultures, makes them blossom in a new and surprising way, pruning them so that they bear more fruit.
The image matters in both directions. “Seeds” means that Indigenous cultures are not spiritually empty before evangelization; “pruning” means that Christian discernment can challenge or reshape elements of any culture. Leo also stresses dialogue: the Church listens to Indigenous voices and is enriched by their distinctive contribution, while Christians are called to proclaim Christ and keep God, rather than power, technology, or any created reality, at the center.
A common misunderstanding is to treat respect for Indigenous culture as requiring the Church to affirm all ancestral religious practices as equally true or as independent paths to salvation. The Church’s sources do not make that claim. The 1993 Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith text rejects a project of reviving pre-Columbian religions by separating them from Christ and the universal Church. The 2007 text similarly describes the Christian encounter as a genuine synthesis and argues that a return to pre-Christian religions apart from Christ would not be progress.
But the opposite misunderstanding is equally misleading: that evangelization should eliminate Indigenous identity or replace it wholesale with a foreign cultural form. John Paul II explicitly urged that the Gospel should not destroy local culture, but should respect and develop what is good in it. In 1992, he described inculturation as both the integration of authentic cultural values into Christianity and the rooting of Christianity within different cultures.
The Church’s position, then, is neither “all inherited beliefs are equally compatible with Christianity” nor “Christianity requires Indigenous people to abandon their culture.” It is a discernment: preserve what is genuinely good, bring it into Christian life, and measure beliefs and practices against the Gospel.
Indigenous presence in Andean Catholicism is not confined to historical memory. The sources identify continuing expressions in community traditions, languages, artistic work, popular devotion, and the public presence of Indigenous peoples as bearers of human, cultural, and Christian wealth. Leo XIV calls on Indigenous peoples to bring that distinctive contribution freely into the wider “assembly of nations,” and says the Church listens and is enriched by their voices.
At the same time, a theological account of cultural encounter should not be mistaken for a complete history of colonization and evangelization. The 2007 text makes a strong claim that the Gospel did not amount to cultural alienation or the imposition of a foreign culture. Leo XIV’s later message, however, calls for recognition of both the “highlights and the wounds” of the past. That language cautions against presenting the history as uncomplicated or assuming that the sources settle every question about coercion, loss, or injustice. The materials here support a Catholic framework for respecting and discerning Indigenous cultures; they do not provide enough historical detail to assess particular episodes or the full range of Indigenous experiences.
The lasting Catholic significance of Andean culture is therefore not that it has been frozen in an ancient past, or that its distinctive identity must be set against Christianity. It is that Indigenous peoples continue to shape the living expression of Catholic faith, while the Gospel calls every culture—including Christian cultures—to conversion and deeper human flourishing. In Andean popular Catholicism, that encounter is visible in communal worship, local devotions, inherited social values, and the ongoing work of holding cultural memory together with faith in Christ.