President Milei welcomes Pope Leo during historic visit to Argentina | Politics News

Argentinian President Javier Milei has welcomed the head of the Catholic Church Pope Leo XIV at Buenos Aires’s Jorge Newbery airport, marking the first papal visit to the country in nearly four decades.

Milei and his sister, presidential secretary Karina Milei, greeted the pope on Sunday amid growing tensions between the government and Argentina’s Catholic Church over his austerity programmes.

In his first public address in the Latin American country, Leo, 71, offered a pointed counter to the libertarian president’s free-market agenda.

“The economy must serve the person, not the person the economy,” Leo told leaders in the Argentinian capital.

While the pontiff encouraged an economic agenda that “stimulates private initiative”, he also urged policies that benefit “the unemployed, retirees and all those who, despite hard work, nonetheless struggle to meet their household’s needs”.

Argentina is the second stop in Leo’s 12-day, three-country tour of Latin America, which began with three days in Uruguay.

His visit was the first from a pontiff since the late Pope John Paul II’s trip in 1987

A shrinking Catholic population

While in Argentina, Pope Leo attended a welcome ceremony at Plaza San Martin and a meeting with Milei at the Casa Rosada, the official presidential palace.

He is also scheduled to visit a prison and celebrate mass in Buenos Aires, Lujan and the province of Cordoba. He leaves for Peru on Wednesday.

But the pontiff’s visit comes amid shrinking membership in the Catholic Church in Latin America, as well as a sometimes fractious relationship with politicians like Milei.

Catholics comprise the largest religious group in Latin America, with as many as 425 million people identifying with the church.

The overall population, however, has shrunk over the last decade. A Pew Research Center survey found that the percentage of self-identifying Catholics in Argentina slipped from 71 percent in the 2013-2014 year to 58 percent a decade later.

Milei himself has suggested he considered converting to Judaism, though he was raised in the Catholic faith.

Political schisms have also emerged in recent years between Milei’s government and the Catholic Church.

The Argentinian president had a notably contentious relationship with Leo’s predecessor, Pope Francis, who was born in Buenos Aires in 1936.

Even before he won the presidency with a dark-horse campaign in 2023, Milei had generated headlines for denouncing Francis on topics ranging from taxation to social programmes.

He was known to call the late pontiff a “communist” and an “imbecile who defends social justice”.

Francis was also the first pope from the Americas, but he never visited Argentina as head of the Catholic Church. He died in 2025.

Some observers saw Leo’s visit on Sunday as rectifying that omission from Francis’s tenure.

“Leo is going to make the visit that Francis never did,” said Reverend Lorenzo “Toto” de Vedia, who works with poor communities in a neighbourhood of Buenos Aires.

Leo’s speech

Milei struck a more welcoming tone on Sunday after Leo, the first US-born pope, arrived in Buenos Aires. He called the arriving pontiff an “exceptional figure”.

For his part, Leo sought to deliver a message that bridged political divides.

“There are causes and occasions that transcend our differences,” Leo said in his speech.

Still, the pope entreated officials to embrace their roles as public servants, responsible for the wellbeing of others.

“Authority is most authentic when it is exercised as service,” Leo said.

“Those who exercise authority have a duty to act with prudence, to acknowledge the limits of the power entrusted to them, and ⁠to direct their decisions toward the good of the entire community.”

Under Milei, the Argentinian government slashed public spending, with the aim of combatting inflation and eliminating the country’s fiscal deficit.

The president also rolled back subsidies, loosened regulations and pursued the privatisation of state-owned companies.

But while Milei has delivered a budget surplus and reduced inflation, real wages remain lower than they were when he took office. About 300,000 formal jobs have also been lost since the reforms began.

Argentina’s public universities have also been caught in the crossfire of Milei’s spending cuts. Leo, however, used part of his speech on Sunday to call for greater state investment in education and vocational training.

“A nation must seriously ask itself where it has failed when its young people have to leave their homeland in order to make their dreams come true,” the pope said.

He added that the country’s democracy is “a part of Argentina’s heritage that needs to be safeguarded”.