Trees are being planted in the garden. The brightly coloured buildings are getting another coat of paint. The choir rehearses. Hundreds of other residents, several of them using wheelchairs, practise their positions outside the sanctuary. Excitement is in the air, because on Monday 9 November, the Cottolengo Don Orione – a Catholic-run home for disabled people – will be the first stop on Pope Leo XIV’s first full day of his trip to Argentina.
But the pope’s visit to Claypole, about 26km from Buenos Aires, does not come at an especially happy time for the home, which counts about 400 residents with disabilities. Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, has made wide-ranging cuts to disability funding.
“[The government] cut off the supply of medications, special foods and diapers. They haven’t delivered any since last November. The matter is in court,” said the facility’s coordinator, Fernando Montero. The pope and Milei, he said, “have completely opposing ideologies”, arguing that the pope teaches that a person’s worth is not measured by whether they are productive, whereas Milei is a “hyper-capitalist” who believes only “those who compete the most should be rewarded”.
Pope Leo’s three days here – he began a three-country trip through South America in Uruguay on Friday, and will finish with six days in Peru – will be the first papal visit to Argentina since John Paul II in 1987. His predecessor, Pope Francis, who was Argentine, never returned during his papacy.
The trip could prove uncomfortable for Milei. A far-right libertarian economist who campaigned with a chainsaw as the symbol of his promised spending cuts, Milei called Francis an “imbecile” and “the representative of the Evil One on Earth” in 2020, and accused him of promoting communism, saying social justice was theft. Milei claims to have apologised when he met Francis in the Vatican in February 2024.
Since taking office the previous December, he has slashed public spending, which the government says was needed to curb inflation. The cost, however, was high. The thinktank Mate estimates that retirees on the minimum pension – 63% of the total – have lost about 30% of their purchasing power. Last Wednesday at the weekly retirees’ march outside Congress, a man held up a cardboard sign reading, “Save us Pope Leo XIV – Milei is killing us.”
Last month, Buenos Aires archbishop Jorge García Cuerva said Leo XIV would find “a divided Argentina and a large number of very poor brothers and sisters.”
But the differences between the pope and the president go beyond typical social issues. In May, Leo XIV called for “disarming” artificial intelligence, while Milei has said he would not regulate AI technology and has instead presented bills to build datacentres across the country and to grant legal status to “no-human corporations”. Federico Sturzenegger, a minister in charge of state cuts, says he has used AI to draft legislation.
Milagros Miceli, a sociologist and computer scientist who leads the Critical AI Lab in Berlin, said the “contradiction” between the two is “pretty evident”. She welcomed Leo’s visit, celebrating how the “powerful figure” of the pope intends to put “human beings at the centre by stripping these technologies of the values that are presented to us as taking precedence over humanity.”
Juan Grabois, a left-wing Peronist deputy and social leader who served in the Vatican’s Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, said: “The idea of absolute deregulation is at the heart of the president’s agenda, and the replacement of the human element with these forms of algorithmic power has clearly also become a policy priority for the government.”
Disability funding has been a flashpoint between church and state. As Milei has clashed with Congress over a funding law that remains in limbo, Argentina’s conference of bishops wrote to the health minister, Mario Lugones, on 1 April, denouncing “the serious situation facing numerous institutions dedicated to the care and support of people with disabilities in our country”. The ministry has met the bishops twice since, in April and again on 5 October, but without resolving the impasse.
The government is trying to downplay potential tensions. “There’s no way the pope is going to come here to comment on local politics,” Sandra Pettovello, the minister overseeing social policy, said recently. Amnesty International, meanwhile, has written to the pope about Argentina, warning of its “concern about government decisions that affect the exercise of fundamental rights”.
All of this will be top of mind when Milei receives the pope at the airport on Sunday. From the disability home, the pope will go on to Buenos Aires and meet business and union leaders; then on Tuesday he will celebrate Mass at the grounds of FAdeA, the state-owned military aircraft factory in Córdoba, whose workers have protested against Milei’s cuts. Juan Cruz Esquivel, director of Buenos Aires University’s Barometer of Religions and Beliefs, says the itinerary speaks for itself.
“I don’t want to speculate [about what the pope will say], but clearly any mention of defending domestic production, labour, disability or social justice in the pope’s rhetoric naturally clashes with the ideology that Milei’s government has been promoting,” says Esquivel.
Mariano Oberlin, a Catholic priest in an impoverished neighbourhood of Córdoba, expects the clash to play out diplomatically. “Pope Leo has been saying it without confronting, but he keeps upholding the church’s social doctrine as the key axis of his ministry,” Oberlin said. “If Milei wants to use him, he’ll probably have to do a lot of juggling to make him say the opposite of what he’s been saying – and of what he’ll surely say when he comes: that the Gospel invites us to feel like brothers, to respect each person’s deep, inherent dignity, and to fight so that this dignity becomes real in access to rights.”
Since Francis’s tenure, social movements in Latin America have come closer to the Catholic church, and Argentina is no exception. Grabois, who was part of that process, sees the relationship as a two-way exchange. “[Francis] wasn’t the ‘good priest’ who came to help the poor,” he says, arguing that the exchanges helped Francis “develop his social thinking”. “Without the cartoneros (cardboard pickers) and the villeros (people from impoverished neighbourhoods), Francis would not have been Francis.”
To Grabois, the same is true for Leo. “Francis took notice of Leo because he saw him supporting the Peruvian indigenous movement.”
That doesn’t mean all Argentine social movements support the pope. On Saturday, a day before the visit, the LGBTQIA+ community will hold the 35th Pride March in Buenos Aires. María Rachid from the march’s organising committee said: “The church’s dogma regarding our families has not changed at any time, neither under the previous pope nor under this one”, though she notes that Francis’s words on gay rights “brought some relief to many families and their communities”.
But a new development is the rise of evangelical churches, while Catholic identification falls. Buenos Aires University found 57.7% of Argentines identify as Catholic and 17.4% as evangelical, compared with 76.5% and 9% nearly 20 years ago. Last week, Milei inaugurated an evangelical temple in Neuquén and gave a nakedly political speech promising to seek re-election next year. Although Catholicism remains Argentina’s majority religion, it has lost its cultural hegemony and its influence on legislative agenda, Esquivel said.
Nevertheless, a majority of Argentines expect a “message from the pope focused on the social and humanitarian agenda”. Grabois notes the transformative impact that first Francis and now Leo have had “with left-leaning activists” in Argentina. “I’m not speaking about atheists, but outright anticlerical people. People who, 10 years ago, held views that were very, very hostile toward the church,” he said. “I even see them as more fervent [about the visit] than typical churchgoers who attend Sunday Mass.” For Grabois, “in the face of dehumanisation, ordinary people are taking refuge in the only global voice that’s speaking out about this today – which is Francis and Leo’s.”
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