Venezuela migrants also remember Pope Leo XIV for his work in Peru

Chiclayo, Peru (AP) – In front of the door of a migrant shelter, 900 meters from the Peruvian Pacific, the Venezuelan Betania Rodríguez looks at the photos she keeps on her tablet when in 2019 she was portrayed with Robert Prevost who was then bishop of the small city of Chiclayo and then would become Leo XIV.

The Pope is remembered with appreciation for the premises in Chiclayo, in the Peruvian coastal north, but also by the Venezuelan migrants who left their country since 2017 in the midst of the economic collapse and found bed and food in a shelter managed by Prevost and the order of San Vicente de Paul.

“We are eternally grateful for the support he gave us, from obtaining a foreign card, to a house where to have a safe roof for our children,” said Rodríguez, 43, with a broken voice. She migrated with her husband and two children from the Venezuelan city of Barquisimeto in 2019.

In his own way, Prevost promoted the protection of migrants, which was one of the main priorities of its predecessor Francisco.

Peru has received a wave of Venezuelans since 2017, totaling around 1.5 million and have been distributed throughout the territory of this South American country, including Chiclayo.

When in 2019 he opened the migrants hostel that has a lonely statue of a Virgin Mary almost at his entrance, Prevost said that the place of wooden walls and zinc roof was a project “very important because it offers a place where people with great need can be welcomed … to feel hope again.” He added that helping “living the spirit of the Gospel.”

Walking along the wide land of sand of the shelter, in which a dozen families of extreme need live, Rodríguez recalled that migrants had nowhere to stay because they did not have work. Difficulties increased when in 2020 the Government of Peru ordered a confinement of more than 100 days to stop the infections of the pandemic of the pandemic Coronavirus who killed more than 217,000.

Father Jorge Millán, who was a parish priest of the Chiclayo Cathedral until 2023 when Prevost traveled to Rome to assume the presidency of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America, commented that Leo XIV had intense schedules that included the help to the Peruvian settlers of the nearby villages, but also by the Venezuelan migrants who remain in absolute vulnerability, without work, money or family networks support. “It was a very difficult time,” said Millán.

From Rodríguez’s memories, Prevost continued to help, sometimes delivering living chickens that he got donations and then, when the government of Peru allowed the face -to -face masses, the then bishop mentioned that Jesus Christ was also a migrant because in his childhood he fled to Egypt to escape the persecution of a king who wanted to kill the children of two years.

On one occasion, at a mass in the San Juan María Vianney parish of Chiclayo “the bishop himself said that he himself was a migrant and that migrants must be treated with respect and solidarity,” Rodríguez recalled. “That confirmed my confidence in him.”