POPE LEO VISITS PERU, HIS "SECOND HOMELAND"

Pope Leo XIV landed at the Callao air base Wednesday evening and Peru went off. Before the white hat he was Robert Prevost, an Augustinian missionary who showed up in 1985, became a Peruvian citizen in 2015, and spent years running the diocese of Chiclayo. Peruvians call him Padre Robert. A few million of them turned out, and one 85-year-old woman waited for him holding a handmade pope plush doll her niece sewed. The tributes got away from everybody. Callao unveiled a 46-foot statue of him with his arms spread wide, fiberglass finished to look like white marble, the tallest statue of a pope in the country. Lima baristas are foaming his face into cappuccinos. There are pope shirts, pope songs, pope sweets. LATAM built him a custom in-flight menu for his domestic hops, including arroz con pato a la chiclayana and a king kong stuffed with manjar blanco. Then there's the schedule, which is brutal. Six days, five cities, Pacific coast to Andes to Amazon, with Cusco and Pucallpa crammed into one Sunday. He's 71 and roughly a month removed from lung cancer surgery. He also got to stand at the Government Palace next to President Keiko Fujimori, daughter of former dictator Alberto Fujimori, and keep a straight face about it.

Why you should give a shit: The first American pope is spending his big homecoming nowhere near America, and Peru put up 46 feet of fiberglass to make sure everyone knows which country actually raised him.