The brightly coloured buildings are getting another coat of paint. Hundreds of other residents, several of them using wheelchairs, practise their positions outside the sanctuary. Excitement is in the air, because on Monday 9 November, the Cottolengo Don Orione – a Catholic-run home for disabled people – will be the first stop on Pope Leo XIV’s first full day of his trip to Argentina.
But the pope’s visit to Claypole, about 26km from Buenos Aires, does not come at an especially happy time for the home, which counts about 400 residents with disabilities. Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, has made wide-ranging cuts to disability funding. They haven’t delivered any since last November.
The matter is in court,” said the facility’s coordinator, Fernando Montero. The pope and Milei, he said, “have completely opposing ideologies”, arguing that the pope teaches that a person’s worth is not measured by whether they are productive, whereas Milei is a “hyper-capitalist” who believes only “those who compete the most should be rewarded”. Pope Leo’s three days here – he began a three-country trip through South America in Uruguay on Friday, and will finish 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 papacy. The trip could prove uncomfortable for Milei. A far-right libertarian economist who campaigned with a chainsaw as the symbol of his promised spending cuts, Milei called Francis an “imbecile” and “the representative of the Evil One on Earth” in 2020, and accused him of promoting communism, saying social justice was theft.
Milei claims to have apologised when he met Francis in the Vatican in February 2024. Since taking office the previous December, he has slashed public spending, which the government says was needed to curb inflation. The cost, however, was high.
The thinktank Mate estimates that retirees on the minimum pension – 63% of the total – have lost about 30% of their purchasing power. Last Wednesday at the weekly retirees’ march outside 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 “disarming” artificial intelligence, while Milei has said he would not regulate AI technology and has instead presented bills to build datacentres across the country and to grant legal status to “no-human corporations”.
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