Peru's Chiclayo welcomes its former shepherd home, and revels in pope's love

CHICLAYO, Peru (AP) — If the “popemania” that has taken over Peru’s capital is any indication, Pope Leo XIV is in for quite a welcome party when he arrives in his beloved former diocese of Chiclayo on Friday.

Chiclayo, population 700,000, is the commercial hub of Peru’s northern Pacific coast. But much of the world heard about it on the night of Leo’s election, May 8, 2025, when he gave Chiclayo a shoutout, in Spanish, from the loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica.

And on Friday, Chiclayo is welcoming its former shepherd home.

“I’m so glad he’s returning,” said Rolando Antonio Mendoza, who was selling posters bearing the pope's image in front of the cathedral where Leo used to celebrate Mass. “Even though he’s now Pope Leo XIV, he hasn’t forgotten about his homeland.”

Church organizers say as many as a million people could turn out for Leo’s first big Mass in Peru, being held Friday morning on a massive field outside Chiclayo.

The former Robert Prevost spent two decades as a missionary priest and bishop in Peru and credits the place and its people with teaching him how to be a shepherd. Pope Francis sent the Chicago-born Augustinian to take over as bishop of Chiclayo in 2014 and he stayed until Francis summoned him to Rome in 2023 to run the Vatican's bishops' office.

In hindsight, the 2023 transfer to Rome signaled that Francis saw in Prevost a potential successor, since the job is one of the most important in the church and would give Prevost the Vatican experience that many consider necessary to be a viable contender for the papacy.

But Prevost's heart is in Chiclayo, where he remains beloved for championing social justice issues and for his closeness to the people, especially poor people, during times of crisis. And he had quite a few during his tenure: COVID-19, devastating floods, and a surge of Venezuelan migrants as the humanitarian situation worsened there in 2018.

“Chiclayo is a party,” said Rocio Zena, who remembered how Prevost helped her when she lost her family home in the 2023 floods. “We’re overjoyed to welcome the Holy Father with so much faith. He arrives, no longer as Prevost but as Leo XIV. And he’s coming home.”

In town, the El Trebol restaurant proudly calls itself the restaurant of the pope and his image is displayed in framed photos of Prevost riding a horse, wading through the mud in rubber boots and celebrating his birthday with a cake.

A sign on his favorite table — No. 3 — with a view of the cathedral, reads: “mesa bendita” – Spanish for blessed table. Like many other places around the city, the restaurant sells “Papaletas” or “Pop(e)sicles with Leo's image in white chocolate.

Just a few steps from the restaurant, a life-size cardboard cutout of the pope now welcomes visitors to his former residence at the diocese, where an exhibit displays the amaranth purple, scarlet and white zucchettos, or skullcaps, that he wore as bishop, cardinal and now pope.

“I feel so happy about my work because the pope is Chiclayano,” said Cynthia Charrary, who was sweeping the streets near the city’s main square ahead of Leo’s arrival. “We want our city to be cleaner than ever.”

Ever since Leo touched down on Peruvian soil on Wednesday, the world has seen a very different pope.

Normally reserved and placid, the 71-year-old Leo has seemed at turns positively giddy and overwhelmed with emotion to the point of tears.

That was certainly the case on Thursday night when some 60,000 young Peruvians sang for him in the Lima stadium. It was also the case when he sang the national anthem at the presidential palace upon his arrival on Wednesday.

Leo has also sung along with popular songs and hymns, tapping his fingers to the beat on an armchair.

On other occasions, he has shown himself so relaxed and comfortable as to joke about his health. Speaking to Peruvian bishops, he joked about how some “doubting Thomases” didn’t think he’d make it because of his recent lung cancer surgery.

After the Mass, Leo's other main events of the day include a meeting with Chiclayo clergy and seminarians and a speech to the Catholic university where he served as chancellor during his years as bishop. The university is named for the 16th-century first archbishop of Lima, St. Turibius de Mogrovejo.

Leo is particularly devoted to Mogrovejo and in many ways modeled his ministry on his.

Mogrovejo is revered for having traveled long distances on horseback to be with his flock and for having defended the rights of Indigenous and enslaved peoples. He studied Quechua and Aymara and oversaw the printing of church teaching in these Indigenous languages, because he believed the faith had to be transmitted in a language people could understand.

The Rev. John Lydon, an Augustinian who lived with Leo in Peru for over 10 years, says his commitment to Peruvians, human rights and involving the lay faithful in the running of church initiatives was born during his stints first as a young missionary priest in Chulucanas, then Trujillo and finally as bishop in Chiclayo.

Lydon recalled that when Leo first arrived in Peru in the mid-1980s, during the period of the Shining Path terror campaign and the authoritarian Fujimori regime’s crackdown, then-Rev. Prevost led a campaign to collect signatures to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

“These are the kind of things that just mark his identity,” Lydon recalled.

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Winfield reported from Lima, Peru

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

A cutout of Pope Leo XIV is displayed outside a restaurant in Chiclayo, Peru, where the pontiff served as bishop, Friday, Nov. 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Martin Mejia)

People take a selfie with a sign of Pope Leo XIV in Chiclayo, Peru, Thursday, Nov. 12, 2026. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd)

Faithful cheer during a prayer vigil led by Pope Leo XIV at the National Stadium in Lima, on the seventh day of his twelve-day apostolic journey to South America, Thursday, Nov. 12, 2026. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini)

Pope Leo XIV leaves at the end of a prayer vigil at the National Stadium in Lima, on the seventh day of his twelve-day apostolic journey to South America, Thursday, Nov. 12, 2026. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini)

Pope Leo XIV catches a stuffed lion as he arrives to lead a prayer vigil at the National Stadium in Lima, on the seventh day of his twelve-day apostolic journey to South America, Thursday, Nov. 12, 2026. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini)

Wildfires leave behind charred trees and scorched vegetation that impact the streams and rivers providing drinking water to much of the country, and new studies show that contamination could remain for more than a decade.

These findings about the longevity of contamination in the nation's drinking water supplies are especially concerning as climate change and increasingly strong El Niño weather events, which intensify drought conditions, have led to bigger and more frequent wildfires in the U.S. So far in 2026, there have been 68,179 blazes burning more than 9.5 million acres (3.8 million hectares).

After a wildfire sweeps through hillsides and forests, rains carry ash and organic matter into the streams that feed water treatment plants for towns and cities alike. Communities are working to adapt, but it can take years and require stopgap solutions.

People in the City of Las Vegas, New Mexico, went without water for months after the Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon wildfire contaminated the Gallinas River in 2022. In the four years since, they’ve had to give residents bottled water and ship tanks in from nearby towns as they collected funds to build a new treatment plant.

Karen Pettine, who has owned the Hillcrest Restaurant for 50 years, said the water crisis forced them to close, sometimes for a week at a time.

“It’s hard to run a restaurant without good water,” she said. “We used some paper plates at times. They brought in semi-truckloads of bottled water. You could pick up four cases at a time. The water situation is ongoing because when it rains, it floods and it brings dirty water down the stream.”

Las Vegas Mayor David Romero said climate change has made the things that used to be reliable less predictable.

“It’s a scary situation that we’re all going to encounter,” he said.

Wildfires are a natural part of forest ecosystems, but an increase in their severity has made areas that capture, filter and regulate the flow of water, known as watersheds, vulnerable, said Amanda Hohner, an assistant professor at Montana State University who specializes in wildfires and water quality.

Forested watersheds provide water to nearly two-thirds of municipalities in the U.S., according to Carli Brucker, lead author of a University of Colorado Boulder study that assessed wildfire-affected water quality in hundreds of burned basins and compared them to unburned areas. Their study found that the impacts can last up to eight years.

Garrett McKay, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Texas A&M, said utilities are extremely concerned about the impacts wildfires have on water. They’re reaching out to experts like him for help finding different water sources or to learn how to treat the organic matter coming into their plants.

Water treatment facilities that rely on streams and rivers typically treat high quality water, aided by trees and soil that act as a natural filtration system, Brucker said. But wildfires cause spikes in heavy metals or dissolved organic matter, which the plants aren't built to handle, she said.

This can force treatment facilities to shut off the incoming water and resort to other sources, which may not be immediately available, Brucker said. Some have groundwater or reservoir backups, but even those can be impacted.

Reservoirs can serve as a “sedimentation basin” where particles can settle, said Kyle Shimabuku, an assistant professor of civil engineering at Gonzaga University. But sediments from burned vegetation are rich in nutrients, like nitrogen and phosphorus, and as they sit in still water, algal blooms can grow, he said. The algae can make people sick and kill the fish.

Chlorine, routinely used to treat water, also is impacted by wildfires, said McKay at Texas A&M. When facilities add disinfectants, like chlorine, to water, they react with the dissolved organic matter left behind by the fires to form “disinfection byproducts,” which are regulated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency because they can cause illnesses, including cancer.

Since plants can't remove the disinfection byproducts, they must get rid of the organic matter before disinfecting the water, which can cause delays in the water supply.

When a 2020 wildfire burned the area around No Name and Grizzly creeks, the primary water sources for the city of Glenwood Springs, Colorado, officials scrambled to protect against sediment expected to wash down the slopes when spring rains arrived. They sought help from the Colorado Water Conservation Board. Within two months, the board authorized an emergency loan of $8 million for improvements to the treatment system.

Fort Collins faced a similar challenge that year when ash and sediment from the Cameron Peak fire forced the city to close its river intake and pull water from the Horsetooth Reservoir, which was safe to use because it's fed by a different watershed.

Las Vegas, New Mexico, was hit harder when the Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon fire damaged the Gallinas River watershed in 2022. A massive rainstorm swept ash and sludge from the burn scar into the river and reservoirs, forcing the town to shut down its water treatment plant while they installed additional filters and looked for additional water sources.

As they worked on solutions, a massive flood in 2024 carried more burn debris into the town’s two reservoirs, leaving them with only a few days of safe water. As businesses closed and residents bought bottled water, the town hired trucks to bring 2.2 million gallons (8.3 million liters) of water from nearby towns of Santa Fe and Santa Rosa.

They were hit again in February 2025. Burn scar debris coupled with bad weather and equipment failure caused a pressure drop, which resulted in a monthlong boil-water advisory and more water shipments.

“The February event was probably the scariest,” Romero said.

Ultimately, the state and federal governments allocated $148 million to rebuild the town's treatment plant and help support their efforts to find other options, including drilling wells and reusing water. Groundbreaking on the first phase of their new water treatment plant is slated for Nov. 18, the mayor said.

“We’ve been doing a lot of work for other sources of water and we know with climate change and what we experienced in the past, the Gallinas River is something we can’t depend on forever.”

FILE - Storrie Lake is seen Aug. 9, 2022, near Las Vegas, N.M. (AP Photo/Brittany Peterson, File)

FILE - A slurry line wraps around billowing smoke from the Grizzly Creek Fire on Aug. 24, 2020. (Kelsey Brunner/The Aspen Times via AP, File)