Trees are planted in the garden. Brightly colored buildings get a fresh coat of paint. The choir rehearses. Hundreds of other residents, many in wheelchairs, practice their positions outside the sanctuary. Excitement is in the air, because on Monday, November 9, the Cottolengo Don Orione – a Catholic home for people with disabilities – will be the first stop on the first full day of Pope Leo XIV’s trip to Argentina.
But the pope’s visit to Claypole, about 16 miles from Buenos Aires, does not come at a particularly happy time for the home, which has about 400 disabled residents. Argentine President Javier Milei has made significant cuts in funding for people with disabilities.
“(The government) cut off the supply of medicines, special foods and diapers. They haven’t delivered any since last November. The case is before the courts,” said the facility’s coordinator, Fernando Montero. The pope and Milei, he said, “have completely opposite ideologies,” arguing that the pope teaches that a person’s worth is not measured by their productivity, while Milei is a “hypercapitalist” who believes that only “those who compete the most should be rewarded.”
Pope Leo’s three days here — he began a three-country South American trip in Uruguay on Friday and will end 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 pontificate.
The trip could prove uncomfortable for Milei. A far-right libertarian economist who campaigned with a chainsaw as a symbol of his spending-cutting promises, Milei called Francis a “fool” and “representative of the Evil One on Earth” in 2020, and accused him of promoting communism, saying social justice was theft. Milei says he apologized when he met Francis at the Vatican in February 2024.
Since coming to power last December, he has cut public spending, which the government said was necessary to curb inflation. The cost, however, was high. Think tank Mate estimates that retirees on the minimum pension – 63% of the total – have lost around 30% of their purchasing power. Last Wednesday, during the weekly retirees’ march in front of 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 the “disarmament” of artificial intelligence, while Milei said he would not regulate AI technology and instead introduced bills to build data centers across the country and grant legal status to “non-human corporations.” Federico Sturzenegger, minister responsible for state budget cuts, claims to have used AI to draft bills.
Milagros Miceli, a sociologist and computer scientist who runs the Critical AI Lab in Berlin, said the “contradiction” between the two is “pretty obvious.” She welcomed Leon’s visit, celebrating the way in which the “powerful figure” of the pope intends to put “the human being at the center by stripping these technologies of the values which are presented to us as taking precedence over humanity”.
Juan Grabois, a left-wing Peronist lawmaker and social leader who served in the Vatican Dicastery for Integral Human Development, said: “The idea of absolute deregulation is at the heart of the president’s agenda, and replacing the human element with these forms of algorithmic power has clearly become a political priority for the government as well. »
Funding for people with disabilities has been a flashpoint between church and state. While Milei is in conflict with Congress over a funding law that remains pending, the Argentine bishops’ conference wrote to Health Minister Mario Lugones on April 1 to denounce “the serious situation in which many institutions dedicated to the care and support of people with disabilities find themselves in our country.” The ministry has met with the bishops twice since, in April and again on October 5, but without breaking the deadlock.
The government is trying to minimize potential tensions. “There is no question of the pope coming here to comment on local politics,” Sandra Pettovello, the minister responsible for social policy, recently declared. Amnesty International, for its part, wrote to the pope about Argentina, warning him of its “concern over government decisions that affect the exercise of fundamental rights.”
All of this will be a priority when Milei receives the pope at the airport on Sunday. From the home for the disabled, the pope will travel to Buenos Aires and meet with business and union leaders; then on Tuesday he will celebrate mass in the premises of FAdeA, the military aircraft factory in the state of Cordoba, whose workers protested against Milei’s budget cuts. Juan Cruz Esquivel, director of the Barometer of Religions and Beliefs at the University of Buenos Aires, says the route speaks for itself.
“I don’t want to speculate (on what the pope will say), but it is clear that any mention of the defense of national production, work, disability or social justice in the pope’s speech naturally conflicts with the ideology promoted by Milei’s government,” Esquivel says.
Mariano Oberlin, a Catholic priest from a poor neighborhood in Córdoba, expects the clash to play out diplomatically. “Pope Leo said this without confronting him, but he continues to support the social doctrine of the Church as the key focus of his ministry,” Oberlin said. “If Milei wants to use him, he will probably have to juggle a lot to make him say the opposite of what he says – and what he will surely say when he comes: that the Gospel invites us to feel brothers, to respect the deep and inherent dignity of each person, and to fight so that this dignity becomes real in access to rights.
Since Francis’ mandate, social movements in Latin America have moved closer to the Catholic Church, and Argentina is no exception. Grabois, who participated in this process, sees the relationship as a two-way exchange. “(Francis) was not the ‘good priest’ who came to help the poor,” he said, asserting that the exchanges helped Francis “develop his social thinking.” “Without the cardboard makers (box collectors) and villeros (people from poor neighborhoods), François would not have been François.
For Grabois, the same goes for Léo. “Francis noticed Leo because he saw him supporting the Peruvian indigenous movement.”
This does not mean that all Argentine social movements support the pope. On Saturday, a day before the visit, the LGBTQIA+ community will organize the 35th Pride March in Buenos Aires. María Rachid, of the march’s organizing committee, said: “The dogma of the Church regarding our families has not changed at any time, neither under the previous pope nor under this one,” while stressing that Francis’ words on gay rights “have brought some relief to many families and their communities.”
But a new development is the rise of evangelical churches, while Catholic identification declines. The University of Buenos Aires found that 57.7% of Argentines identify as Catholic and 17.4% as evangelical, up from 76.5% and 9% almost 20 years ago. Last week, Milei inaugurated an evangelical temple in Neuquén and gave a purely political speech promising to seek re-election next year. Although Catholicism remains the majority religion in Argentina, it has lost its cultural hegemony and influence on the 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 François and now Leo have had “with left-wing activists” in Argentina. “I’m not talking about atheists, but real anticlericals. People who, ten years ago, had very, very hostile views towards the Church,” he said. “I consider them even more fervent (about the visit) than the typical faithful who attend Sunday Mass.” For Grabois, “faced with dehumanization, ordinary people take refuge in the only global voice that speaks today on this subject, that of François and Léon.”
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