Pope Leo XIV departs Rome on Monday, April 13, for his most ambitious international journey to date, a 10-day apostolic tour across four African countries that will see the 70-year-old head of the Catholic Church cover nearly 18,000 kilometres on 18 flights, visiting 11 cities before returning on April 23.
The pope is making the visit with a mission “to help turn the world’s attention to Africa,” said Cardinal Michael Czerny, a senior Vatican official and close adviser to Leo. Africa represents the fastest-growing part of the Catholic Church worldwide, growing from 281 million members in 2023 to over 288 million in 2024, and the continent now produces more than half of all new Catholics baptised each year.
The trip, his third international journey since becoming pope, will take him to Algeria, Cameroon, Angola and Equatorial Guinea. Key themes across all four stops include peace, migration, interfaith dialogue, environmental stewardship and the exploitation of natural and human resources.
In Algeria, where Islam is the state religion, Leo will make history as the first pontiff ever to visit the country. His connection to the Algerian-born St. Augustine, the towering figure of Christianity who is well known to Algeria’s Sunni Muslim majority, has served to favourably introduce Leo to the country. He will tour the Great Mosque of Algiers and visit Annaba, the site of the ancient city of Hippo where Augustine served as bishop and which holds deep personal significance for Leo, himself a member of the Augustinian religious order. Cardinal Jean-Paul Vesco, Archbishop of Algiers, described the visit as that of “a brother who comes to visit his brothers.”
Algerian authorities turned down the Vatican’s request for Leo to visit the Tibhirine monastery, where seven French Trappist monks were kidnapped and killed in 1996 by Islamic fighters during the country’s brutal civil war, with the government stating it had “no intention of reopening a painful chapter of its history.”
In Cameroon, the central focus will be peace and reconciliation. One of the highlights will be a “peace meeting” Leo will lead in the northwest city of Bamenda, featuring testimony from a Mankon traditional chief, a Presbyterian moderator, an imam and a Catholic nun. The Anglophone crisis, pitting separatist movements in English-speaking Cameroon against the French-speaking central government, has killed more than 6,000 people and displaced over 600,000 others since 2017, according to the International Crisis Group.
Angola’s stop will centre on economic justice and the legacy of colonialism. Angola is a Christian-majority country with Catholics constituting approximately 49 percent of the population, and Leo will pray at the Sanctuary of Mama Muxima, a Marian shrine that draws around two million visitors annually.
The tour concludes in Equatorial Guinea, a resource-rich country where more than 70 percent of the population is Catholic but where more than half the nearly two million people still live in poverty, with oil revenues widely accused of enriching the ruling Obiang family rather than the broader population. The country has not received a papal visit since 1982.
Catholic priests and sisters across the continent say they hope Pope Leo’s visit will ignite hope and offer comfort to a region suffering armed conflict, climate-related disasters and vast humanitarian need, all worsened by the withdrawal of development aid by the United States and other donor nations.
