Pope leaves Uruguay with a call to keep sowing faith
By Francesca Merlo – Florida, Uruguay
“I carry you in my heart," Pope Leo told Uruguayans on Sunday, as he brought an end to closing Mass in Florida, on the feast of Our Lady of the Thirty-Three, the country’s patroness.
Although Uruguay is a relatively small country, he had been told its people have generous hearts and are capable of great things. “That has become evident over these past few days,” he said.
He extended his gratitude to the civil and religious authorities, to the volunteers, families and communities who had prepared each gathering, but also to all those who followed them - be it from near or far.
What they had shared, he said, should now spread beyond Montevideo, Paysandú and Florida - the three cities he visited.
“Such is the mathematics of faith: what we have received and freely offer, with God’s grace, multiplies, opens new horizons and enriches our lives, giving them new meaning," said the Pope.
Over these days, that generosity has had many faces and many ages. A three-year-old Mother Teresa, and then an baby one. There were toddler priests and nuns, and young doctors and firefighters: along the walk from Montevideo’s Plaza Independencia to the Metropolitan Cathedral, children dressed as the people they admired waited to welcome Pope Leo XIV. One girl held up a sign asking for a hug.
There were also the young people and volunteers, of all ages, waiting outside the Apostolic Nunciature to wish him goodnight.
There were families in Casavalle welcoming him to a neighbourhood where the Church’s presence takes the form of classrooms, meals and houses. And there were the crowds at the Centenary Stadium, where a father who did not consider himself Catholic was nevertheless delighted to welcome the Pope to his country.
In Florida, before the small image that has accompanied so much of Uruguay’s history, Pope Leo’s thoughts turned to the people through whom faith first enters a home.
The faith learned at home
“I think of the mothers who placed the first words of prayer on their children’s lips,” the Pope said. He spoke, too, of grandmothers who kept an altar at home, prayed for the living and the dead, and made God present in ordinary life.
Much of Uruguay’s history of faith, he reflected, had never been written in books. It had passed quietly between generations.
And this reflection fit perfectly at the closing of a visit that has repeatedly made that quiet faith visible. Across a country with a deeply rooted secular tradition, the welcome has included people whose relationship with the Church is strong, others whose connection is more distant, and those who came simply because they wanted to be there.
In Florida, Pope Leo directly addressed the pain that such distance can cause within families. Some mothers and grandmothers, he acknowledged, had taught children to pray who no longer did so. They had once gone to Mass together; now, years had passed since those children entered a church.
“Do not consider what you have sown to be lost,” he told them.
A place for each person
In Casavalle, the hope of something taking root had a very concrete shape. The twelve houses blessed during the papal visit belong to a much longer commitment by the parish and community: work that began before the Pope came and will continue after he leaves.
At the Catholic University of Uruguay, the conversation also looked towards what comes next, especially in this difficult age of rapidly changing technology.
In each encounter there was a shared concern for what one generation places in the hands of another.
Carrying the welcome forward
On his first evening, Pope Leo greeted the young people outside the Nunciature with a question: “Where are the Pope’s young people?” enouraging them to make themselves heard.
By Saturday evening, at the Centenary Stadium, his message to this somewhat smaller Church in the region was equally direct: “To shed much light, we do not need to be many, but rather to reflect the Lord’s light.”
And in Florida, he asked that the welcome of these days become a willingness to take the first step towards someone else: a child, a friend, a neighbour, someone who had stopped believing or had never been spoken to about God.
“There are doors that you cannot open,” he told families, “but God can.”
As his visit drew to a close beside Our Lady of the Thirty-Three, Pope Leo XIV left Uruguay with encouragement to keep drawing near, to keep blessing, and to keep sowing.
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