Pope Leo XIV Denounces Machismo and Urges Protection of Women on Return to Peru

Pope Leo XIV on Thursday, November 12, 2026, denounced machismo and violence against women in Peru, calling on Catholics to value women, respect girls and protect women. The 71-year-old pope was on his first return to the country where he lived and served for two decades and became a citizen. He had received an emotional homecoming on Wednesday, when President Keiko Fujimori met him; he had protested her father's policies in the past. On Thursday he turned to church business, urging Peru's influential bishops to model unity and communion and to accompany their flocks. He told them to answer victims of clergy sexual abuse with truth and justice, and he met six survivors, including some from a sect-like group that Pope Francis suppressed last year. In Lima's Plaza Mayor, 40,000 people serenaded him with the coastal song "Contigo Peru", and he sang along.

Left-leaning outlets take two different angles. CBS News leads with the speech, stressing its emotional tone, the call to value women and the pope's remark that Peru taught him what it means to be a shepherd, with correspondent Chris Livesay reporting. The New York Times headline frames the trip as a personal and political return, "meeting ghosts of his past", and highlights Fujimori and the father's policies he opposed. Neither excerpt mentions the abuse-survivor meetings. The two also differ slightly on his time in Peru: CBS says several decades, the Times two. The Hindu, an alternative source, shares CBS's focus on machismo but adds the bishops' charge, the survivors and the crowd of 40,000. It also describes the pope as relaxed and overjoyed. Right-leaning outlets had not reported this story at the time of writing, while left-leaning and alternative outlets had.