Vatican premieres documentary León de Peru on Pope Leo XIV

The Vatican premiered this June 20 the documentary “León de Peru”, which tells Robert Prevost’s passage as a priest and bishop in the South American country before being elected Pedro’s successor and taking the name of Pope Leo XIV.

“This documentary travels through Robert Francis Prevost’s missionary work in Peru. The trip travels various places in the country, such as Chulucanas, Trujillo, Lima, Callao and Chiclayo, where the voices of different people report the pastoral and social work of the future Pope,” says a note of Vatican Media.

The documentary is a production of the Editorial Directorate of the Dicastery for Communication and has been carried out by the journalists Salvatore Cernuzio, Felipe Herrera-Espaliat and Jaime Vizcaíno Haro.

This production premiered in Spanish, Italian and English, on the day the Catholic Church celebrates San Juan de Matera, an Italian monk whom God protected from slander.

Pope and Culture of Peru

In the documentary, the Bishop of Callao, Mons. Luis Alberto Barrera, comments how Pope Leo XIV was adopting the culture of Peru, starting with the Castilian language.

“Robert did not feel like someone foreign. If they hear him speak in Spanish – the Americans have a strong leave – not. He had assumed the Spanish language so well that he spoke like a Peruvian,” said the prelate.

“The dialogue has always been with him very fraternal, of brothers and also his sense of empathy with culture, his proximity made the difference completely. He had done an inculturation process, to enter the culture of Peru and speak like us,” said the bishop.

Father Roberto’s work with women who fell into prostitution

Another of the stories that the documentary is in is the testimony of Sylvia Vázquez, a woman from Chiclayo who was a victim of trafficking when she was a child, who remembers the accompaniment and help received by Robert Prevost, holding the work of the congregation of the adoratrices sisters, who gave education to women who had fallen into prostitution.

“I met Father Premost because he was also along with the adoratrices, he also met with the people of the group of trafficking in people,” recalls the woman who also helped the victims of trafficking in the city of northern Peru.

“We were going to see the girls to the bars, the sites, to invite them to the workshops and the father (Prevost) Mass, all the girls listened and some talked to him and the Pope also listened to them.”

Sylvia emphasizes that with these women, many of whom were mothers and had fallen into prostitution for poverty and lack of work: “Pope León (it was) very good, he has been very generous and he told me: ‘Sylvita, you are a beautiful person, a valuable one, you are there in the group in which we are and will go well.”

Fr. Robert Prevost, from the Order of San Agustín, arrived for the first time in Peru in 1985, specifically to the prelature – now Diocese – of Chulucanas, the year in which the deceased former president Alan García assumed power, who at the end of his first government left the country in a very serious economic crisis.

Shortly after, the now Pope Leo XIV returned to the United States and, after a while there, returned to Peru in 1988, now to the Archdiocese of Trujillo, where he was in charge of training the Augustinians and where he was a professor at the Seminar of San Carlos and San Marcelo, in addition to fulfilling various pastoral work in several local parishes until 1999.

He was then a provincial prior in Chicago and also served, in two periods, as a prior general of the Augustinians. In 2014 he returned to the north coast of Peru, now to the Diocese of Chiclayo, of which he was first apostolic administrator and subsequently Bishop.

The Holy Father assumed Peruvian nationality in 2015 and received the National Identity Document, whose data updated at the end of this May in the Vatican.

Mons. Robert Prevost also served as Apostolic Administrator of Callao and vice president of the Peruvian Episcopal Conference, where the deputy secretary, Fr. Guillermo Inca, keeps a pleasant memory of him: “The emotion of having heard the name of Cardinal Robert Prevost as Pope, pastor of the universal church, was really indescribable, an unforgettable moment,” said the priest to Aci Press On May 10.