Cardinal Castillo urges Peru's bishops to recover St. Toribio's missionary spirit
At the closing Mass of the Peruvian bishops' 130th plenary assembly, 300 years after the saint's canonization, the archbishop of Lima said St. Toribio de Mogrovejo turned the pastoral visit into an experience of closeness with communities
The archbishop of Lima, Cardinal Carlos Castillo, called on Peru's bishops to rediscover the missionary spirit of St. Toribio de Mogrovejo at the closing Mass of the 130th Plenary Assembly of the Peruvian Bishops' Conference on August 20, 2026. The celebration marked 300 years since the saint's canonization, and Castillo devoted his homily to the way Toribio carried out his mission: staying close to communities and giving himself without reserve to evangelization.
Castillo recalled that St. Toribio, the second archbishop of Lima and patron of the Latin American episcopate, made four pastoral visits across his vast diocese. The Council of Trent required such visits, but the saint turned them into something different in kind. "That visit, which Toribio lived out in a very singular way, through a process of closeness to and knowledge of the life of our peoples," he said, became more than a merely formal exercise.
One episode Castillo recounted was Toribio's arrival in Paita, a city in the Piura department of northern Peru then struck by disease, from which the saint decided to return to Lima on foot rather than by sea. "He came on foot. It took him three or four months, and he reached Lima, but along the way he was getting to know people and talking with them, asking them how things were," Castillo said. The journey was a continuous exercise in meeting those under his pastoral care.
Castillo also pointed to the influence of Bartolomé de las Casas's thinking on Toribio's work. The saint promoted evangelization through "gentleness," he said, mirroring the way Jesus announced the Gospel. "He is something like the incarnation of Jesus in our lands," Castillo said, adding that evangelization and mission are above all a grace.
Castillo encouraged the bishops to measure their own ministry against Toribio's example and put a direct question to them: "How much of Toribio's radically evangelizing example do I have?" He said the Church in Peru needs to recover the free giving and generosity that marked the saint. Despite his own financial straits, Toribio never closed his hand to those in need.
The Church must "return to the heart of things," Castillo said, working with the action of the Holy Spirit that Toribio passed on as part of a Church that is missionary, freely giving and generous. "How much of that experience of freely given love are we willing to follow that path," he asked the clergy present.
Following Toribio's example does not mean reproducing the pastoral forms of the 17th century, Castillo said, but reading the signs of the present time. He pointed to the synodal path promoted by Pope Leo XIV as an essential way of discerning how to proclaim the Gospel in current circumstances.
Pope Leo XIV will visit Peru in November. Castillo recalled the pope's personal link to St. Toribio: when he was bishop of Chiclayo, he would visit the saint's tomb in Zaña. The visit should be an occasion for the Church in Peru to examine what it needs to renew, Castillo said.
At the end of the Mass, the president of the Peruvian Bishops' Conference, Bishop Carlos García Camader, described St. Toribio as a shepherd who did not wait for the people to come to him but went out to meet them. "The shepherd has to be close to the people, know them, listen to them and walk with them," he said. The papal visit should not remain a matter of protocol, he added, but become a genuine encounter with the Peruvian people.
The celebration ended with the presentation of relics of St. Toribio de Mogrovejo to the Diocese of Chosica, which will distribute them among the suffragan dioceses of the ecclesiastical province of Lima.
