Pope Leo XIV is midway through an eleven-day African tour, having arrived first in Algeria before travelling on to Cameroon, Angola, and Equatorial Guinea. The trip — only his second major overseas journey after last year's visit to the Middle East — reflects the shifting centre of global Catholicism: nearly 300 million Africans, close to 20 percent of all Catholics worldwide, live on the continent, a share that is expected to grow substantially in the decades ahead.

In Algeria, the pope followed in the spiritual footsteps of Saint Augustine, the early Christian theologian born in what is now northeastern Algeria during the Roman Empire. After opening the visit in Algiers, Leo XIV travelled some 450 kilometres east to Annaba — ancient Hippo, where Augustine served as bishop until his death. The city holds personal significance for the pope, who visited twice previously as prior general of the Augustinian Order. He toured the archaeological site, visited a care home run by religious sisters, and celebrated Mass in the Basilica of Saint Augustine, the only public religious ceremony on the Algerian leg of the trip. Algerian media welcomed the visit warmly, with the French-language daily Le Soir headlining its front page: "The land of Saint Augustine receives the pope."

The journey was shadowed, however, by serious concerns about religious freedom. Algeria, a predominantly Muslim country of around 48 million people, designates Islam as the state religion. A 2006 decree criminalises proselytising among Muslims by non-Muslims, carrying penalties of up to five years in prison. Dozens of Protestant churches have been closed in recent years, and in 2022 Caritas, the official Catholic aid organisation, was forced to cease operations in the country. A Algerian pastor, Youssef Ourahmane, who converted from Islam to Christianity, was convicted and sentenced to a year in prison for holding what authorities deemed unauthorised services. The US Commission on International Religious Freedom placed Algeria on its watch list in 2023, and a March 2026 report found no improvement. Shortly before Leo XIV's arrival, two suicide bombings occurred in Blida, southwest of Algiers; the connection to the papal visit remained unclear.

Critics questioned whether the pope was doing enough to address this repression directly. Human rights researcher Charlotte Touati of the University of Lausanne wrote an open letter urging Leo not to subordinate the trip to diplomatic considerations: "Believers must not be ignored simply to appease political authorities." The pope's public remarks in Algiers — delivered at the monument to those who died in Algeria's war of independence — focused on peace and interfaith dialogue, with only an oblique reference to persecution: he blessed "those who are persecuted for the sake of justice, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." The Vatican's preference for quiet diplomacy over public confrontation on such issues is a long-standing point of contention with human rights advocates.

Criticism came from a different quarter as well. US President Donald Trump, in a post on his Truth Social platform published just before the pope's departure, accused Leo XIV of political bias, alleging he directs criticism disproportionately at Western countries. "Leo should get his act together, use common sense, stop catering to the radical left, and focus on being a great pope," Trump wrote. The outburst added a further layer of political tension to a trip already freighted with questions about whether the Church's leader will speak plainly about the dual reality confronting Christianity in Africa: a faith that is rapidly growing in confidence and numbers on one hand, and one that in certain countries remains vulnerable to state-sanctioned repression on the other.