Pope Leo XIV plans first major South American journey in Uruguay

Visit will renew Uruguay’s old conversation about laicidad

Pope Leo XIV will begin his first major South American journey in Uruguay on Nov. 6, according to the Vatican’s official program for the visit. The three-day itinerary will take him to Montevideo, Paysandú and Florida, with stops at the Metropolitan Cathedral, the Catholic University of Uruguay and the Centenario Stadium before concluding on Nov. 8.

The pope will meet President Yamandú Orsi and celebrate Vespers at the Metropolitan Cathedral on the evening he arrives. On Nov. 7 he will fly to Paysandú for Mass, then return to Montevideo to visit the Casavalle neighborhood and the Catholic University before leading a prayer vigil at the Centenario Stadium. His final day will take him to Florida, where he will celebrate Mass on the feast of the Virgin of the Thirty-Three, Uruguay’s patroness. The stop in Florida, where Uruguay’s 1825 Declaration of Independence was proclaimed, closes the trip. That final stop carries a quiet irony: even in this secular republic, the nation’s story is bound up with a Catholic image named for the patriots who began the fight for independence. The visit will renew an old conversation about what Uruguayans mean by laicidad, or secularism.

The destination is unusual for a papal visit. A 2025 Pew Research Center study found that Christians made up just 44% of Uruguay’s population in 2020, while 52% claimed no religious affiliation. The figures make Uruguay the only country in Latin America and the Caribbean without a Christian majority.

The country’s secular character developed over more than a century. The Constitution of 1830 made Roman Catholicism the state religion, but the second half of the 19th century steadily eroded the church’s institutional power. In 1861, the government secularized the country’s cemeteries after a clash over the burial of a Freemason involving Jacinto Vera, then the apostolic vicar who headed Uruguay’s church. José Pedro Varela’s 1877 Law of Common Education made schooling free and compulsory and set public education on a secular path.

The Constitution approved in 1917 and in force from 1919 completed the separation. Its Article 5 guarantees freedom of worship and declares that the state supports no religion, a provision still in force today. Uruguay went further than formal separation: in 1919 it renamed its religious holidays, so that Holy Week became Tourism Week and Christmas became Family Day. Those names remain on the official calendar.

For much of the 20th century, religion stayed at the margins of public institutions and political debate, in contrast to neighboring countries where Catholicism remained deeply woven into public culture long after church and state parted ways.

Against that background, the arrival of John Paul II on March 31, 1987, as the first pope ever to visit Uruguay, was extraordinary. That night he prayed at Vera’s tomb in the cathedral. The next day he celebrated Mass at Tres Cruces in Montevideo before more than 150,000 people, and in his homily he called on young Uruguayans to become builders of a “civilization of love.”

The Mass left behind an unexpected controversy. A large cross had been raised for the occasion, and after the pope left, Uruguayans argued over whether an explicitly Christian symbol belonged permanently on public land. The Montevideo departmental board voted against keeping it, but Parliament later approved it. President Julio María Sanguinetti, an avowed agnostic, backed the cross as a monument to a historic event, and he still cites that decision as an expression of Uruguayan tolerance.

The episode raised a question the country still debates, Pizzo wrote: does a secular state require religion to vanish from public space, or can it allow different beliefs to appear openly without official endorsement? Sanguinetti has consistently defended the second interpretation. In a column titled “Una vez más, laicidad republicana” he argued that laicidad, or secularism, was never meant as hostility toward religion.

John Paul II returned in May 1988 for a longer visit that took him to Montevideo, Melo, Florida and Salto. His global stature and his ability to combine spiritual conviction with social concern allowed him to reach Uruguayans who rarely, if ever, set foot in a church.

Nearly four decades later, Uruguay is more secular still, and it has adopted laws the church opposed: abortion under specified conditions, state-regulated recreational cannabis and, in October 2025, euthanasia. After the Senate approved the “Dignified Death” law, the Uruguayan Episcopal Conference warned that it promoted a “culture of death” in a country already struggling with high suicide rates. President Orsi, whose Frente Amplio coalition strongly backed the bill, signed it into law later that month. The two men will sit down together within hours of the pope’s arrival.

That policy disagreement frames the November visit. No papal visit can reverse a century of secularization, and Leo XIV cannot replicate Pope John Paul II’s impact, because Uruguay in 2026 is not Uruguay in 1987, according to Nibia Pizzo, a psychologist and academic director of “Legacy of the Americas” at the Global Peace Foundation, writing in UPI’s Voices section. The more interesting question, Pizzo wrote, is whether the current pope can speak to Uruguayans who do not consider themselves religious and can disagree with the government over end-of-life policy while still being heard in a country where a 2025 Cifra survey found that 62% of Uruguayans supported legalizing euthanasia.

Pizzo wrote that Leo XIV has one potential opening into this debate. He chose his papal name in homage to Leo XIII, who confronted the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution, and he has made the ethical challenges of artificial intelligence a central theme of his pontificate, warning against handing machines decisions that belong to human beings. Concern for human dignity in a technological age is a language secular Uruguayans already speak, Pizzo wrote. The vigil at the Centenario, the same stadium where Jacinto Vera was beatified in 2023, may be the place to test it.

Pizzo wrote that in 1987, John Paul II surprised a secular nation, and that this November Leo XIV will have the opportunity to begin his own conversation with Latin America’s most secular country, in a language believers and nonbelievers alike can understand.