Pope Leo’s visit lays bare Spain’s tangled politics of faith and migration

As Pope Leo XIV’s visit to Spain comes to an end, the party that might have been expected to welcome a papal visit most enthusiastically is instead the most uncomfortable. Vox, the far-right party led by Santiago Abascal, treats Catholicism as a foundational marker of Spanish identity. But Leo’s visit exposed the tension between that claim and the Church’s own teaching on migrants, war and human dignity.

The pope’s speech to the Spanish parliament on Monday did not sound like an endorsement of Abascal’s politics, however staunch a Catholic the Vox leader claims to be. Reaching back to the School of Salamanca, the 16th-century movement whose theologians defended the rights and dignity of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas against the logic of conquest, Leo summoned a Catholic tradition that measured power by its treatment of the vulnerable. In a country now convulsed by the politics of immigration, no one could miss what kind of politics that history was meant to indict.

Vox embodies exactly the politics Leo was indicting: it has called for mass deportations, rebranded as “remigration”, including of undocumented migrants, immigrants’ children, some born in Spain, and those Abascal accuses of living off public benefits or refusing to adapt to Spain’s customs, and it has fought the arrival of unaccompanied migrant minors. Pope Leo visited the island of Gran Canaria to speak to those who have risked their lives on the Atlantic migration route from Africa to Europe. At least 1,214 of them died or disappeared en route to the Canary Islands last year, according to the International Organization for Migration, and NGOs put the toll far higher. His determination to highlight the plight of asylum seekers and migrants had already set him at odds with the administration of US President Donald Trump, which Abascal admires. By contrast, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, whose government recently opened a path for at least 500,000 undocumented migrants and asylum seekers to regularise their status, had every reason to welcome the visit.

To understand the context of Pope Leo’s visit, it helps to remember that Spain is not the Catholic country it was a generation ago. The state pollster CIS recorded about 68 percent of Spaniards identifying as Catholic a decade ago; by the spring of 2025, that share had fallen to 52.8 percent, with only 17.3 percent describing themselves as practising. And yet Spain is also seeing a surprising revival of Catholic identity among Generation Z and young millennials. According to the Fundacion SM “Jovenes Espanoles 2026” survey, the share of young Spaniards identifying as Catholic has jumped from 31.6 percent to roughly 45 percent in five years, reversing decades of secularising trends. The shift has run alongside a sharp rightward turn among young voters.

Pope Leo appeared to address this new landscape directly. At an open-air mass last Sunday in Madrid, attended by more than a million people, the American pontiff drew a line between Christian values and far-right politics when he told the crowd that “no one can kneel before the Lord and despise their brother”.

Abascal, Vox, and these young conservative voters must have noted that Pope Leo’s political agenda is not sympathetic to theirs. This is why, after the holy father addressed parliament, the far-right leader said we “must distinguish between speeches and practical policy. These are the words expected of a religious leader.” Although Abascal is trying to minimise the pope’s message, he knows it’s becoming harder to defend the version of Christian values his party claims as its own. And the party’s recent attack on Spanish bishops for supporting the government’s migrant amnesty led Pope Leo to warn against the Church being instrumentalised for political ends.

All this could jeopardise next year’s general election. Vox is rebuilding its regional alliances with the conservative People’s Party (PP), now reflected in PP-Vox agreements in Extremadura, Aragon and Castilla y Leon, and hopes to carry that partnership into national power if the PP, as forecast, wins. As the PP continues its alliance with Vox, which includes adopting the far-right “national priority” policy that favours Spaniards over foreign-born people in housing and benefits, it might also begin to lose part of the Catholic vote it relied on for so long.

Pope Leo and Sanchez look aligned on both fronts: immigration and the US-Israel war on Iran, which the pope called “unjust” and the prime minister “illegal”. But if the far right is unhappy with this visit, the Socialist Party should not assume it has gained an ally in the American pope. The Catholic Church plays a longer and more cautious game than party politicians, and has been compromise-oriented for centuries, an instinct that has served it well. There is also a deeper calculation at work: as Christianity loses ground and its practitioners represent a declining share of the global population, its centre of gravity is shifting to the Global South, the very regions much of Europe’s migration comes from. The Church’s defence of migrants is therefore bound up not only with principle, but with its own future. But principle is one thing; concrete political alignment is another.

On most ethical issues, such as family and abortion, the Catholic Church is still closer to Vox than to the Socialist Party. That will not change, because these positions rest on doctrine and revelation, not on political convenience. Sanchez’s best hope, then, is a tactical convergence with the pontiff, using a favourable moment to separate the vote of progressive Catholics from that of traditionalists. In “catolicisima” Spain, the Spain once imagined as most Catholic, that is already a great result.

It is striking that, in an era when religious sentiment is no longer common currency, the Catholic Church remains central to political debate, especially in a country like Spain, where religion still shapes political identity. In a world where politics struggles to provide a shared meaning of life, and speaks to uprooted individuals often bound only by fleeting fears, the Church still offers an ancient sense of community. That is why politicians on rival sides court a pope who refuses to speak as one of them, and why his words in Madrid inevitably became political.

The views expressed in this article are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.