He arrived in Spain after a year of exercising the papacy (one of the most complicated offices in the world and one that must be learned little by little) with a public image of a humble, serene, calm and listening Pope. But Spain transformed him and, in Spain, he went from Leo XIV to Leo the Great.
In just one week, the Pope of tenderness achieved a triumphant apotheosis in Madrid, Barcelona and the Canary Islands, with the handicap that the first two are among the most secularized cities in Europe.
What are the reasons for this resounding papal success? It is evident that a frank and cordial reception was expected. A total welcome from believers, who feel the need to perceive themselves as such in the streets and squares of the country, when until recently proclaiming oneself publicly Catholic was something shameful.
But the reception was brutal and unexpected also at the lay and social level, not only from the great masses, but from the social and political leaders of the entire parliamentary spectrum, who stood up and gave him a seven-minute ovation.
What could have caused the success of the calm Pope in Spain?
People are fed up and weary of so much confrontation, so much corruption and so much lack of values. And they sought in the Pope the global moral icon, the world reference, the man of hope, the one who embodies the two-thousand-year-old wisdom of the Church, the head of the institution that, despite its shadows, continues to give meaning and hope to more than one billion three hundred million people in the world.
The Spanish people have also been charmed by the tenderness and delicacy of a Pope who appears to be a good person and who, perhaps because of this, attracts the humblest people, who see him as one of their own. He radiates authenticity.
Furthermore, Leo attracts more people because he provokes less rejection than Francis. We have moved from a prophetic and revolutionary Pope to a Pope obsessed with the unity of the Church and, therefore, much less radical. The fact is that he is perceived as more moderate, more centered and less revolutionary.
People have seen him as a being of light, amid so much darkness, wars, confrontations and threats. Amid a climate of growing polarization and political leaders who only speak to each other to insult. The Pope has also been seen as the bearer of common sense ethics, which is so lacking.
People have perceived him, moreover, as the Pope of empathy and emotional intelligence. He does not overwhelm with his presence, but makes one feel confident. That is, Leo XIV presents a different way of being a leader and exercising leadership.
Although he has neither sought nor desired it, people have cast him in the role of global anti-Trump leadership. The only one who can stand up to his bullying from the pulpit of his worldwide moral authority.
With his encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, he has also become a sort of defense lawyer for humanity against the fear and danger represented by AI and the technocrats who direct it, and who are dragging us toward a world where the algorithm rules and reigns above the human person and their sacred dignity.
Leo XIV must face the algorithm technocrats and Trump’s Maga and, for that, he needs to seek powerful allies. To defend humanism against posthumanism, Leo XIV sought to make Spain, with its still powerful Catholic culture and its capacity for influence throughout Latin America (with predominantly Catholic countries), his ally in this ‘crusade’ or, better, socio-cultural-religious battle. And Spain has responded affirmatively to his call. At least by the millions of people who took to the streets. Will politicians and the bishops themselves also understand this?
In Catalonia, Leo XIV came to demonstrate that the Church has been and remains the greatest producer of art in the history of humanity. The Sagrada Familia is of such beauty that it fulfills the ecclesiastical maxim of ‘through beauty toward God’. Furthermore, all his virtues were valued there and one more: his capacity for adaptation, his flexibility, to read his speeches before delivering them and introduce abundant ad libs in Catalan, conscious, as a missionary he was, that language is the soul of culture and of the Catalan people, beyond any type of nationalism.
In his brilliant journey through Spanish soil, only two criticisms can be leveled at him, one very serious and the other minor, but symbolic. The serious one was the treatment of the victims. No one understands why, when he had it so easy, Cardinal Cobo complicated his life so much by inviting only some of the more sympathetic and controlled victims to the meeting with the Pope, leaving out the more combative associations. How easy it would have been to invite Juan Cuatrecasas and Miguel Hurtado, the leaders of the victims’ associations. Fear and excessive caution are always bad advisers.
The minor blemish, but with strong symbolic weight, was the absence of the papal vehicle on the streets of Lucero, where he arrived in the armored BMW. Is a popular and peripheral neighborhood less safe for the Pope than the Castellana or the Salamanca neighborhood?
Aside from those two failures and amid an almost perfect logistical machine, the pope provoked the Leo effect, which made him Leo the Great, who, wherever he passed, was working miracles.
José Manuel Vidal
Religión Digital