LIMA, Peru — Pope Leo XIV called on Peru to support the traditional family, respect cultural diversity, and defend the rights of women — all in fidelity to the social doctrine of the Church.
“At the center of every social, economic, and political organization must be the human person, created in the image and likeness of God, endowed with infinite dignity and called to live in relationship with others. On this basis, the personal, familial, and social good come together as one reality,” Leo said on Nov. 12 to an estimated 40,000 people gathered in Lima’s main square.
The topic of the event was “the challenges and hopes for the future of the Peruvian people.”
Leo’s remarks underscored how Catholic social teaching cuts across positions that secular politics typically categorize as right- or left-wing.
The pope said that human dignity requires that every child be conceived through natural means and that recent changes in sex roles require the Church “to assert with even greater conviction that God created the human person male and female.”
“It is in this union alone that reciprocity and complementarity are expressed, giving rise to fatherhood and motherhood, filiation and fraternity, and everyone’s commitment to a better society,” he said.
Leo also mentioned other threats to the family including economic problems, emigration, unfettered use of digital technology, and “addictions, such as gambling and betting, alcoholism and drug addiction, abuse or domestic violence.”
Paying tribute to Peru’s “cultural, linguistic, historical, and regional plurality,” the pope called for sensitivity in speaking about other groups.
“We cannot accept expressions or behaviors that classify, offend, or judge people on the basis of their appearance, origin, or social condition, under the pretext of certain jokes or popular slang,” he said.
Leo also said that human dignity “requires that we effectively promote the presence, respect, and participation of women. Their contribution to every sphere of society and the Church is indispensable. It is sad to see that machismo persists, manifested in the absence of fathers from family life, in abuse and violence against women.”
“Women living in poverty or belonging to Indigenous and Afro-American communities are liable to suffer a double marginalization. For this reason, it pains us to see that violence against women — who could be our grandmothers, mothers, sisters, or daughters — continues to be a reality that wounds all of humanity,” the pope said.
Earlier in the day, Leo met with Peru’s Catholic bishops, first at the residence of Lima’s archbishop and later in the morning at the city’s cathedral, where they were joined by clergy, religious, seminarians, synodal teams, and pastoral councils.
The pope praised the Church in Peru for pursuing synodality, a signature initiative of the late Pope Francis that Leo has pledged to continue, which seeks to involve the whole Church, including the laity, more fully in discernment and mission.
Leo also mentioned the problem of clerical sexual abuse, to which he said bishops should respond “as Jesus would, with truth, justice, forgiveness, making amends and an ever more resolute commitment to fostering a culture of prevention and proaction for the weakness in light of such crimes.”
The pope met privately with six abuse abuse victims in Lima on Thursday, after meeting with five others in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on Nov. 9, a gesture that popes have occasionally made on their international travels since Pope Benedict XVI.
Encouraging the bishops to promote communion within the Church and oppose polarization in Peruvian society, the pope coupled values and commitments that are sometimes the subject of division or disparate emphasis among Catholics.
He said the bishops’ mission required them “to combine doctrinal fidelity with pastoral closeness; the celebration of the sacraments with a commitment to our neighbor: and the formation of consciences with a concrete witness of charity.”
To the congregation in the cathedral, gathered for mid-morning prayer, Leo said that the key Christian mission of peacemaking begins at home.
“Peace always begins ‘here and now’ and depends on how we behave, how we look at one another, how we respect one another and how we listen to one another. If we wish to spread peace, we must first safeguard and nurture it before God, within ourselves and among those dear to us, and then spread it in our communities and in the various spheres of social and political life,” the pope said.