The Briefing:
- Pope Leo XIV sent a letter — dated Sept. 8 and released by the Vatican on Sept. 19, 2026 — urging the bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean to leave their desks and be present with their communities, built around St. Toribio de Mogrovejo on the 300th anniversary of his canonization.
- The letter lays out eleven specific exhortations — steady pastoral visits, closeness to priests, a disciplined prayer life, protection of the vulnerable — and warns that abandoning the flock can start long before a bishop is ever physically gone.
- The call for hands-on presence lands just as two of the Church's best-known border ministries, in McAllen, Texas, and Nogales, Arizona, have had to redirect much of their work after asylum arrivals collapsed under tighter federal immigration policy.
A letter written from firsthand experience
Robert Francis Prevost was born in Chicago, became a naturalized Peruvian citizen in 2015, and led the Diocese of Chiclayo, in northern Peru, from 2015 to 2023 before his election as Pope Leo XIV in May 2025. That background shows up in nearly every paragraph of the new letter, which — unusually for a papal document aimed at this region — was drafted in Spanish as its original language, according to the Spanish outlet COPE.
Vatican News reports that the pope built the text around the liturgical rite used to welcome a bishop into his cathedral, turning each gesture — walking through the door, kissing the crucifix, being sprinkled with holy water — into a daily obligation rather than a one-time ceremony.
Eleven concrete asks, not a general appeal
Per Catholic Culture, the letter is organized around eleven distinct exhortations: keeping pastoral visits alive, standing close to priests — especially in their first years of ministry — defending the most vulnerable, protecting daily prayer time and making Eucharistic adoration a pastoral priority.
The pope went further, warning that abandoning the flock "can begin long before any visible flight," according to the official text released by the Vatican. Comfort, fear or self-interest, he wrote, can outweigh the good of the faithful long before a bishop ever leaves his diocese in any literal sense.
Summing up that spirit, Leo XIV described episcopal ministry as work that "demands living with our heart in heaven and our feet on the road".
A Curia still waiting on decisions
The letter also reads as an indirect answer to criticism aimed at Leo XIV himself. Vatican analyst Andrea Gagliarducci wrote in the National Catholic Register that, sixteen months into the pontificate, the Church is still waiting on major decisions: the consistory at which Leo XIV would create his first new cardinals, plus a round of appointments expected to touch at least five senior Curia posts.
That gap gives extra weight to a pope telling his own bishops to get out from behind their desks — it doubles as a call to lead by example, starting at home.
What's changed at the border: McAllen and Nogales look different now
The pope's call to be present "on the road" lands alongside a border reality that no longer quite matches the familiar script. The Humanitarian Respite Center that Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley runs in McAllen, Texas — for years housed in the parish hall of Sacred Heart Church before moving into its own building on South 15th Street — was still seeing close to 700 people a day in 2025, per the Rio Grande Guardian. Then arrivals collapsed: TIME reported in March 2026 that stricter federal enforcement pushed the number of asylum seekers reaching the center to nearly zero, prompting Sister Norma Pimentel, the center's director, to redirect much of its work toward McAllen residents facing poverty, hunger or homelessness. That November, federal officials had also frozen funding to the organization, according to The Texas Tribune.
Something similar has unfolded in Nogales, Arizona, home to the binational Kino Border Initiative. For years the group focused mainly on migrants waiting their turn to request asylum in the U.S. But after the current administration canceled more than 2,000 scheduled asylum appointments at that crossing on its very first day in office, the organization now serves mostly people who have been deported or displaced inside Mexico, according to the National Catholic Reporter and Arizona public broadcaster KJZZ.
Catholic Charities USA, the national network tying these and other diocesan agencies together, says on its own site that its food pantries and other essential services stay open to anyone in need "regardless of race, religion or political affiliation," according to its immigration services page. That kind of steady, physical presence — quieter than the news cycle it once drew — is exactly what Leo XIV holds up as a model for bishops, even as the face of that presence has shifted over the past year.
What comes next
The Vatican hasn't announced any additional public events tied to the letter, but the text is already circulating among the region's bishops' conferences as material for pastoral reflection this year, per InfoVaticana. For Latino Catholic communities in the U.S., the message leaves an open question: if migrant arrivals at the border keep falling, what will the constant, hands-on presence the pope is demanding of his bishops actually look like going forward?
