# Pope Leo speaks of community ‘suffering’ on visit to remote Andes town

- URL: https://talkfuse.com/story/pope-leo-speaks-of-community-suffering-on-visit-to-remote-andes-town/
- Published: 2026-11-15T02:49:45+00:00
- Updated: 2026-11-15T09:20:39+00:00
- Original publisher: BBC World (publisher lean: Centre)
- Original article: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cr4gnz0lv2vlo?at_medium=RSS&at_campaign=rss
- Topics: World

## Key points

- Pope Leo returned to a village in his former Peruvian diocese.
- About 20,000 people gathered in a town of 6,000.
- He spoke about migration, poverty and declining birth rates.

## Summary

Pope Leo XIV returned to a remote village in Peru where he had served as a bishop, drawing a crowd far larger than the town’s population. At an outdoor Mass, he highlighted the hardship of people forced to leave their homes and warned that migration and falling birth rates were putting local communities at risk.

Santa Cruz de Succhabamba has about 6,000 residents, while around 20,000 people came to see the Pope, according to the Vatican. More than 40% of people in the wider Cajamarca region live in poverty, and 729,000 people born there now live elsewhere in Peru. Leo served as bishop in the Diocese of Chiclayo from 2015 to 2023 and is visiting Peru on a 12-day Latin American tour.

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