Pope Leo XIV has concluded an eleven-day tour across Africa, visiting Algeria, Cameroon, Angola, and Equatorial Guinea in what was only the third international trip of his pontificate. The journey covered vast distances and packed schedules, drawing enormous crowds and carrying messages of peace, reconciliation, and economic justice to a continent where Catholicism is growing faster than anywhere else in the world — roughly 290 million Catholics now live in Africa, a number that has recently surpassed the Catholic population of Europe.

The trip began in Algeria, where Leo visited a monument to victims of the Algerian war of independence and met with the Catholic community in Algiers. He also travelled to Annaba, the ancient city once known as Hippo, where Saint Augustine — the fourth-century theologian and founder of the Augustinian order to which Leo himself belongs — is believed to have been born and worked. From Algeria, the pope moved to Cameroon, where approximately 40 percent of the population is Roman Catholic. In Bamenda, a city in the country's restive northwest, he attended a peace service at Saint Joseph's Cathedral and released a dove as a gesture of reconciliation, also speaking out against ongoing conflict in Iran — remarks that drew a sharp rebuke from US President Donald Trump, who posted on Truth Social that Leo should focus on "being a good pope, not a politician."

In Angola, the visit took on particular historical and political weight. Leo celebrated an outdoor mass in Kilamba, a large residential district outside the capital Luanda, drawing around 130,000 people, and prayed at Muxima — a pilgrimage site roughly 130 kilometres southeast of Luanda, built as part of a sixteenth-century Portuguese fortress that historians estimate served as a hub through which some six million people from present-day Angola were enslaved and transported to the Americas. Before Angola's political leadership, the pope delivered a pointed critique of extractivism — the economic model of exploiting raw natural resources with little benefit to local populations. "How much suffering, how many deaths, how many social and environmental disasters are brought about by this logic of extractivism," he said. He also referred repeatedly to Angola's brutal 27-year civil war, in which more than half a million people are believed to have died.

The message resonated across Angola's political spectrum. Adalberto Costa Júnior, leader of UNITA — the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, the main opposition party — praised what he called the pope's "powerful message" addressing the country's social, political, and economic realities. Leo also expressed solidarity with victims of flooding in the coastal region of Benguela, where nearly 50 people have died following torrential rains since early April.

The tour underscores a broader shift in the centre of gravity of global Catholicism. With African congregations growing rapidly and a new pope clearly willing to engage directly with political and economic grievances, the visit signals that the Vatican views the continent not merely as a mission field but as a central pillar of the modern Church.