“Weapons and Walls” — In Madrid, Pope Leo XIV Rebukes the Politics Tearing Us Apart
With Vox leader Santiago Abascal seated in the Royal Palace, the pope warned against leaders who win popularity by “fanning the flames of polarization.” By nightfall, 600,000 filled the Castellana to pray with him.
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Pope Leo XIV stood in the Royal Palace of Madrid on Saturday and told Spain’s assembled leadership that “the temptation to gain popularity by fanning the flames of polarization seems to have grown rather than diminished, and human dignity continues to be violated.”
Seated in the audience was Santiago Abascal, the leader of Vox, Spain’s far-right party. When the pope finished, Abascal rose with the rest of the room and applauded.
The American pope landed at Madrid’s Barajas airport at 10:30 in the morning, where King Felipe VI, Queen Letizia, and Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez welcomed him. No pope had set foot in Spain in 15 years.
The Royal Palace address — delivered before some 300 state authorities, religious leaders, and diplomats after a 21-gun salute — opened a journey that runs through June 12 with stops in Madrid, Barcelona, and the Canary Islands, where Leo will meet with migrants and the organizations that serve them.
The pope asked the Spanish people to lay down the stories they tell against one another. Here is the heart of the speech:
“For the love of truth, I invite everyone to set aside the divisive and polarizing narratives of your societal reality and history, so as to overcome sterile simplifications through the fruitful appreciation of complexity.”
He was speaking to a nation in genuine distress. Sánchez has governed since 2018 atop a fragile coalition now battered by corruption scandals, and the opposition Popular Party and Vox are demanding his resignation ahead of elections due next year.
Migration sits at the center of the fight. Sánchez’s government has moved to grant legal status to potentially hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants — migrants now make up an estimated 10 percent of Spain’s population — and Vox has built its rise on opposition to their presence.
The Vatican has watched Vox’s appeal among Catholic voters with alarm. According to Spanish media reports cited by the National Catholic Reporter, Leo privately warned the country’s bishops against efforts to “instrumentalize the church” in order to “win the Catholic vote” — and he named Vox directly.
The stakes of the visit climb from here. Before the journey ends, Leo will become the first pope ever to address Spain’s parliament — a speech on national unity delivered inside the chamber where the country’s divisions live.
In the palace, Leo offered Spain a different vocation. “I see here a vocation particularly suited to Europe, in which Spain plays a unique and fundamental role,” he said, calling the work of overcoming polarization “the gift that the ‘Old Continent’ can give to the world.” He urged Spain to advance the cause of European unity “not in opposition to other powers, but as a gift to the entire human family.”
The pope also praised Spain “for its faithful adherence to international law and multilateralism, which is reflected in an active commitment to peace and solidarity among peoples.” That sentence will be read carefully in Washington.
Sánchez’s opposition to the wars in Gaza and Iran has provoked open hostility from a Trump administration that has now spent two months attacking the pope himself — a campaign that has left Trump trailing Leo by 54 points in American favorability polling.
The peace message began in the air. As I reported this morning, Leo used the flight from Rome to retire the warhawks’ favorite doctrine, rejecting any claim of a “just war” in Iran.
His answer to the migration fight reached back a thousand years. Security, he told the palace, “which we all too often expect to find in weapons and walls, is in fact best achieved by learning to move forward alongside one another, growing together, side by side.” He recalled the centuries when Christians, Muslims, and Jews on the Iberian Peninsula carved out “a space for contact, conversation and dialogue on the meaning of truth.”
Leo grounded the whole appeal in his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, quoting its cry that “our age, seemingly shaken by terrible imbalances and conflicts, cries out from its depths for peace, for a new understanding of the human person and its inviolable dignity, for a civilization of love.”
The afternoon belonged to the people his speech defended. At the apostolic nunciature, Leo prayed the Our Father with roughly 40 people living with illness and disability. He then visited CEDIA 24 Horas, a Caritas-run center serving Madrid’s homeless.
By nightfall, the Castellana had become a cathedral. Local authorities put the crowd at 600,000 — most of them young people — filling Plaza de Lima and the streets around the Santiago Bernabéu for an evening prayer vigil that ended in Eucharistic Adoration.
“In the face of the emptiness of indifference and compliance, before the violence of war and lies, you must be the sparks of a new humanity,” Leo told them. “You can change history, do it with love.”
America Magazine’s Gerard O’Connell reported that journalists in Madrid heard in the day’s message a meaning that reaches other countries as well — the United States included. Vox trades in the same politics of fear that powers the Trump-Vance movement: the raids, the smears, the daily invitation to treat a neighbor as an enemy.
For American Catholics, the instruction from Madrid is direct: the Gospel that strips Vox of its Catholic veneer leaves no shelter for the cruelty of the Trump-Vance deportation machine. Leo drew that line on two continents in a single day, and he is asking people of goodwill to stand on the right side of it.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with the 600,000 who filled the streets of Madrid on Saturday night — and with everyone of goodwill who still believes the image of God can be found in a migrant at the border, a homeless man at a Caritas shelter, and a young person hungry for truth.
The merchants of polarization want you exhausted, suspicious, and alone. Our faith answers them with solidarity, with the common good, and with a love made visible in action — the same love that turned a Madrid boulevard into a place of prayer.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for something deeper than rage and propaganda. A pope is calling two continents back to the dignity of every human person, and Letters from Leo exists to carry that call into American life.
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Pope Leo is incredible. We are blessed and I am grateful.
Gracias, Papa Leo.