“Today, in the streets of Madrid, the Pope at the head, more than a million people walked behind a light. Tomorrow, in each city, in each hospital, in each home where someone listens with attention, where someone forgives, where someone tends the earth with their hands, that same procession continues.” Jorge Carvajal.
Leo XIV approaches the steps back to Fiumicino as we sit down at the keyboard still knocked out by the very positive impression of what his visit has represented. In the midst of an era of existential emptiness, marked by the hegemony of materialism, there has been a thirst for the transcendent of unknown dimensions. In the midst of a strongly polarized society, there has been a pause for deep reflection, a parenthesis of mutual rapprochement fostered by the Supreme Pontiff and which we hope will continue. All his speeches have been very elaborate, impeccable and timely, and he has manifested himself not only as a religious leader, but as a planetary authority of stature, while indispensable.
We have plenty of years to chase after “Hakuna,” but that has not prevented us from humming in painful solitude in front of the television “The only King…”. We have remained glued to the screen, closely following the steps of the Bishop of Rome through our geography. It is not necessary to be a fervent Catholic, to subscribe to the entire postulates of the Church of Rome, to attend repetitive liturgy, to adhere to its dogmas so often so out of time…, to observe the good that its highest hierarchy has done in its path.
The suffering literally bore a cross that surely was never so light to them. They were wrapped up, embraced by tens of thousands of people from the stands. In reality, all the stands in Madrid, Barcelona and the Canaries felt the warmth of genuine solidarity, lived the yearning to reveal themselves as communion of souls, not merely as followers of a team watching the same scoreboard, the same luminous sign as always. Leo XIV has brought much dawn, opened countless hearts to faith and hope. The young themselves, already wounded from an early age by life, its fangs and circumstances, confirmed it.
Evidently there were absences. There was an excess, mostly at the beginning, a point of hieraticism, lacking more physical embrace, Mediterranean, the embrace as a representation of sincere communion of souls called to leap over the ever abundant protocol. The woman was missing among those endless rows occupied exclusively by cardinals. We would have wished for an encounter with the most suffering victims of abuse…, but we will not stop there. At some moment we will have to put limits to criticism in order to enjoy the instant, the moment of consummation of a longed-for brotherhood. There has been a collection of heartfelt moments that we cannot recount. He who is imprisoned, he who arrived in a “pattera,” she who was on the verge of ending her own life, she who suffered abuse, she who was able to escape misery and rebuild her days thanks to Caritas…, have found a consolation they perhaps did not know before finding themselves before the American Pope.
In Congress the deputies applauded very long, vigorously and unanimously; now all that remains is for them to embody the word, carry the charge to completion. The force of values prevailed over ideology, always separatist. In the city of Barcelona Catalan was for a long time on the pontiff’s lips. That multilingual tact, that manifest generosity, that sincere will to reach the soul of Catalonia should not go unnoticed.
There were perhaps more acclamations than necessary, at times bordering on questionable veneration, but silence and recollection have prevailed over personalistic exaltation. The Church, even with all the defects and errors it may carry, as any other human institution, continues to be a bearer of urgent maxims, a repository of the future.
The drones signed in the lines of the night the deserved recognition to the ingenious architect of God. There are no towers of Christendom higher than others, however much raising them may take many decades. What matters is that they point to the same azure light, that we make of the earth something of that Heaven of more shared glory. The Pope has given us the opportunity to reveal the best of ourselves, of a Spain still palpitating and alive, all too often devoured by Cainite confrontation. It has shown that, in some way, the nation desires to inaugurate a new time, to attend to more essential questions that it had excessively postponed. The exaltation of superior and universal principles, which at all times has been on the lips of the successor of Peter, should continue to permeate hearts.
Koldo Aldai