This is the first trip by a Pope to Spain in 15 years and Leo XIV will stay in the country for a week, with an agenda that includes Madrid, Barcelona and two Canary Islands
More than a million people from all over Spain and other countries, such as Portugal, have traveled to Madrid in recent days to hear the Pope “of truth” and who is “not afraid of peace”.
Leo XIV celebrated a mass this morning in the center of Madrid attended by at least 1.1 million people, according to local authorities, including Vasco, 25 years old, a Portuguese Jesuit who accompanied 17 young students from Colégio das Caldinhas, in Santo Tirso, on a journey of hundreds of kilometers by bus to the Spanish capital. “He is a Pope who is not afraid of this peace, which is quite uncomfortable for many people, which manifests itself in various ways, whether in wars or being closed to our cell phones”, he told Lusa, at the beginning of Alcalá Street, at the entrance to Cibeles Square, where the altar for today’s mass presided over by Leo XIV was installed.
The group of young people from Santo Tirso who accompany Vasco, all in the 10th year, also praise the message they have heard from Leo to everyone who always seeks the truth.
It is precisely because he is “a Pope who speaks in truth and about the truth” that Leo XIV also captivates José Guerreiro, a construction worker from Cádiz, in the south of Spain, who was part of a group of 67 people who traveled to Madrid to be with the leader of the Catholic Church. “While still being doctrinal, it has this pastoral charisma of closeness to people,” he added.
This is the first trip by a Pope to Spain in 15 years and Leo XIV will stay in the country for a week, with an agenda that includes Madrid, Barcelona and two Canary Islands and has a social dimension (very focused on immigration) and political, in addition to the purely religious.
To those who came to hear him today at the mass in the center of Madrid, which included a procession of the Body of Christ, the Pope used the celebration’s homily to tell them that “the Christ who passes through the streets in custody is the same one who identifies with the poor, the downcast, those who are alone and helpless”.
And he left “a commission for the Spain of today and tomorrow: that the country’s centuries-old religiosity should not be a museum of the past”, but “a school that teaches how to kneel before God and before others because no one can kneel before the Lord and despise their brother”. “It’s not just about getting out of custody, but about getting out of selfishness, indifference, and a comfortable and private faith,” he stressed.
Today’s mass should be, according to the organization, the event with the most popular participation on the entire agenda of this week-long trip by Leo XIV to Spain, the first visit of a Pope to the country in 15 years.
This is the Pope’s second mass event in Spain, after more than half a million people attended a “prayer vigil with young people” on Saturday night, also in central Madrid on the Paseo de la Castellana.
