Pope Leo XIV lands in Angola

Pope Leo XIV arrived in Luanda on Saturday for a four-day visit to Angola, the third stop on an 11-day tour of Africa. Euronews reports that the pontiff is scheduled to meet President João Lourenço shortly after landing and to deliver a speech expected to address corruption, poverty and the country’s resource-driven economy.

On Sunday the Pope is due to fly by helicopter to Muxima, about 130 kilometres south-east of the capital, home to a 16th-century church built by the Portuguese that has become one of Africa’s most important pilgrimage sites. The location carries a specific historical weight: Euronews notes that, during the transatlantic slave trade, Muxima served as a place where enslaved people were baptised before being shipped to the Americas. A new basilica is now under construction there as part of a multi‑million‑euro government project to turn the shrine into a major tourism destination.

Angola’s modern economy is defined by extraction and by the state’s ability to distribute the proceeds. The country is Africa’s fourth‑largest oil producer and among the world’s top 20, according to the International Energy Agency, while also ranking as the world’s third‑largest diamond producer, Euronews writes. Yet the same report cites World Bank estimates that more than 30% of Angolans lived on less than €1.83 a day in 2023, despite Angola’s oil, diamonds, gold and rare earth deposits.

That gap between resource wealth and household incomes is not a mystery to Angolans; it is the central political fact. Oil and mining revenues are collected in a small number of places, negotiated through a small number of licences, and converted into budgets and contracts that reward loyalty. In that environment, public services can remain weak without threatening the core revenue stream, while the costs of misrule are spread across a population of roughly 38 million.

The Vatican’s leverage is different: it cannot issue loans or sanctions, but it can force public comparison between national self‑description and lived reality. Euronews notes that around 44% of Angolans are Catholic, giving the Pope a mass audience outside party structures. His message is also likely to land in a country still shaped by war: Angola emerged in 2002 from a 27‑year civil war that began after independence from Portugal in 1975 and is estimated to have killed more than half a million people.

In Luanda, Leo XIV will be the third pontiff to visit Angola, after John Paul II in 1992 and Benedict XVI in 2009. Tens of thousands are expected in Muxima, where a new basilica is rising beside a church built for an empire that once shipped human beings from the same riverbank.