Pope Leo XIV tours struggling Argentine disability home in swipe at Milei's cuts

Pope Leo XIV spent his first full day in Argentina at a home for people with disabilities, using the stop to press his case that the country's most vulnerable should not be left behind. He traveled Monday to Cottolengo Don Orione in Claypole, a suburb south of Buenos Aires, where the institution shelters more than 400 people across 50 hectares (123 acres) of land known as the “city of charity.” The center was founded by an Italian priest in 1935.

The visit landed as a pointed rebuke of President Javier Milei's austerity drive. The home has been battered by cuts that froze payments and dismantled specialized therapy programs that for decades served as a lifeline for many of Argentina's estimated 5 million people with disabilities, according to the Associated Press. Center officials have reported extreme economic distress as the lost funding collided with inflation, and Leo's stop comes just days before the Senate takes up a disability funding bill that Milei opposes.

The message is one Leo has carried since he arrived Sunday with Milei at his side, invoking a favorite line of Pope Francis: “The economy must serve the person, not the person the economy.” He is expected to repeat it Monday when he meets business leaders, union representatives and leaders of popular movements at the Catholic University of Argentina. Among those invited were domestic manufacturers hurt by cheap imports since Milei scrapped long-standing trade barriers, and members of Argentina's largest labor confederation who brought their worries about job losses and shrinking wages to the Vatican in September.

Milei, in office since late 2023, has become a global icon of the conservative backlash against the liberal establishment, and his government has framed the disability cuts as a cleanup of fraud and waste in the federal bureaucracy. Leo was headed next to a late-morning Mass at the Monumento a los Españoles, expected to draw as many as 2 million people — the same venue where St. John Paul II became the last pontiff to celebrate Mass in Argentina nearly 40 years ago. Thousands arrived at midnight to claim a good spot.

“We were dating when John Paul II visited 40 years ago,” Teresa Videla, 63, told the AP from the crowd with her husband and youngest son. “And now it's very special for us to come back and see the visiting pope. So much has happened in the world, in the country, and we now have six children and 15 grandchildren.” Late Sunday, groups chanting “Pope Leo, Pope Leo” and “Long live the pope” gathered outside the Vatican nunciature where he is staying, and a smiling Leo stepped out to greet them and give his blessing. Argentina is the second stop on his three-nation South American tour.