NEWS, Politics, West Africa

Cameroon welcomes Pope Leo XIV

Posted by Europe correspondent on

Brussels 16.04.2026 Pope Leo XIV’s lands in Cameroon on Wednesday, April 15, beginning the second destination of his pilgrimage that will take him also to Angola and Equatorial Guinea.

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Pope Leo XIV’s landed at the Yaoundé-Nsimalen International Airport near Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon, at 2:57 p.m. local time on Wednesday, April 15, marking the beginning of the second stop of his Apostolic Journey.

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Pontifex departed this morning from Algeria – the first country in his itinerary – having arrived on Monday, April 13. He will be in Cameroon until Saturday, April 18, and then will travel to Angola and Equatorial Guinea before returning to Rome on Thursday, April 23.

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Pope Leo XIV was welcomed to the country by the Prime Minister, Joseph Dion Ngute. Two children also greeted him upon arrival. Then different anthems were played and the various members of the delegations of the two states were present. Following the welcome ceremony, the Pope had a brief meeting with the Prime Minister.

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The Pope’s first day in Cameroon
The Pope first stop in Cameroon is at the Presidential Palace, where he will meet privately with the President of the Republic, Paul Barthélemy Biya, before addressing the authorities, civil society and diplomatic corps.

Pope Leo will then visit the Ngul Zamba Orphanage, where he will greet the residents and staff. Then, for his last appointment of the day, he will meet privately with the Cameroonian Bishops at the headquarters of the Episcopal Conference.

There are already 288 million Catholics in Africa, representing more than one fifth of the congregation worldwide. The religion is growing faster in Africa than on any other continent.

In a sign of the region’s growing importance to the church, Leo is visiting Africa before traveling to either the U.S. or South America, one of Catholicism’s traditional strongholds, where he spent two decades of his career before assuming the leadership in Holy See.

However Africa is also a complex ideological territory. It’s where resistance to some of the reforms enacted by Leo’s predecessor, Pope Francis. When Francis allowed priests to bless same-sex couples, it inflamed Africa’s conservative bishops, many of whom still discourage priests from performing the blessings.

It’s a place where Catholicism is in competition with conservative evangelical and Pentecostal rivals for worshipers, and where church leaders worry that Francis’ reforms might have hurt the church’s prospects for expansion.

Leo is potentially wading into long-running tensions over some of Catholicism’s most charged issues.

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The ideological battles being fought in Africa “will define the future of the Catholic Church,” said Ebenezer Obadare, a senior fellow for Africa studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.

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