Buenos Aires, Argentina — Pope Leo XIV bade farewell to Argentina before a crowd of more than 3 million people in Luján City, where he celebrated one of the largest Masses in the history of papal travel, surpassed only by Masses in Manila, the Philippines, and Rio de Janeiro.
The farewell capped a four-day visit, part of a South American tour that took him from the capital to its suburbs and to the central province of Córdoba. Back in Buenos Aires on Tuesday night, he attended a youth vigil the pope himself had asked to add to his schedule.
“Do not kneel before that which cannot give you life!” Leo told the crowd in front of the Monument to the Spaniards, a landmark in the city, where more than one million people had waited for hours drinking mate, the national beverage, and holding candles.
Since the morning, the area had been filled with young people arriving in groups and entire families settling in to wait for the pontiff.
As the popemobile moved down the city’s iconic Avenida del Libertador around 8:30PM local time, after a marathon day in Córdoba, the crowd raised their phones to record his passing, and many greeted him with emotion, applause, tears and songs.
Diana, 40, arrived from Ezeiza, a city on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, holding a bundle of rosaries. “I’m very emotional. I’ve been through two surgeries, and today I can come see Leo. I brought a bundle of rosaries from sick people who couldn’t come, people I don’t know, but I offered to be a bridge so the pope’s prayer reaches them,” she told Latin American Reports.
Under the slogan “Let’s go, get up! He is calling you,” Leo warned young people against money, success at any cost and an obsession with appearances in social media. In his speech on Tuesday night, he said that young people suffer from a “throwaway culture, poverty, loneliness, the scourge of addiction, uncertainty about the future and lack of work.”
After having listened to several testimonies including Agustín, a victim of bullying who spoke about his recovery from drugs, Leo lit a candle. Then he led a prayer “for light and hope,” as young people watching him on giant screens lit their own candles and the crowd broke into a chant borrowed from Argentine soccer stadiums: “Olé, olé, olé, León, León.”
“His Holiness calls us not to give up. He shows us that Jesus is in the other person, in the path you walk every day, in the tiredness, in the exhaustion, to keep going and not give up,” Diana added.
Earlier, Juan, 28, awaited the message the pope would deliver to young people. “We came to pray for young people and for the country, who are in a difficult situation,” he said.
Pope Leo called for reconciliation before leaving Argentina
In a country where 62.9% of the population identifies as Catholic, the first papal visit since 1987 left a message of reconciliation and purpose, as the pope spoke about work, universities and disability in terms that contrasted with the austerity policies of President Javier Milei’s government.
The political tone of his visit was set on Sunday at the Palacio Libertad (Freedom Palace), a major cultural center in Buenos Aires, before governors, lawmakers, officials and the diplomatic corps, at an event that brought together figures across the country’s ideological spectrum.
“This visit must bring all Argentines together, to look inward,” said Milei, who had greeted the pope at the airport.
His speech contrasted with his past confrontation with Pope Francis, the Argentine-born pontiff who died in April 2025 without returning to his homeland as pope. Before taking office in December 2023, the anarcho-capitalist president clashed with the former archbishop of Buenos Aires, calling him “the representative of the Evil One on Earth” and criticizing his views on social justice.
Years later, Milei, who had later apologized to Francis at the Vatican, closed with a request to the late pontiff’s successor: “Your Holiness, I want to ask you to pray for us.”
With government and opposition politicians seated in the same room, Leo said afterwards: “Democracy is also strengthened in the everyday way we act in public life: in the willingness to listen, in care for our words, in the patient search for agreement and in the ability to recognize in those who think differently a fellow citizen with whom we share a common destiny”.
In the same speech, he warned that “the economy must be at the service of the person, and not the person at the service of the economy.” He also asked what goes wrong in a country when its young people must leave to fulfill their dreams, and said keeping them “requires strengthening, in a particular way, education, vocational training, the university and research.” The message came after Milei vetoed a law to increase funding for Argentina’s public universities.
At the Puerto Madero campus of the Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina in Buenos Aires on Monday, he brought together union leaders, representatives of social movements and business leaders in the same room for a meeting with the world of work, where he outlined the Social Doctrine of the Catholic Church.
“Depriving a person of work is not simply denying them an income; it is gravely wounding their dignity,” he said. He also warned about “unregulated automation” and artificial intelligence, which could “put so many jobs at risk.”
The final Mass
After meeting with inmates at a federal prison complex in Villa Devoto, the Pope went to Lujan city, about 70 kilometers (43 miles) west of Buenos Aires. More than 3 million people, according to official estimates, filled the square, avenues and streets around the basilica that houses the image of the Virgin of Luján, Argentina’s patron saint, for the largest Mass of his pontificate, with worshippers climbing fences, trees and lampposts to see him.
The pope stepped down from the popemobile about 200 meters (650 feet) before the altar and walked the final stretch wearing a sky-blue and white chasuble, the colors of the Virgin’s mantle and of the Argentine flag. The visit carried special meaning for a pontiff elected on May 8, 2025, the feast day of Our Lady of Luján.
In his homily, Leo praised Argentina’s richness “not only in its geography, but also in its people,” and recalled Francis. “Argentina, arise and walk!” he urged near the end of the homily. Before leaving for Peru, he said goodbye from the stage: “Thank you, Argentina, for welcoming me with open arms.”
Featured image description: Some three million turned out for the mass in Luján on Tuesday.
Featured image credit: @BAProvincia via X.
