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

The American pope’s message underlines the rift between his Catholicism and that of Spain’s far right.Published On 12 Jun 2026As 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.