Sánchez’s new battering ram against Vox: Pope Leo XIV | Spain

The Pope returns to Congress, and enters once again through the left door. In this case, Pedro Sánchez invited him, who this Wednesday gave Santiago Abascal a quote from Leo XIV’s exhortation Dilexi you in which the pontiff denounces that there are those who seek social “imbalance”, giving full autonomy to “markets and financial speculation”, and “for this reason he denies the right of control of the States, appointed to guarantee the common good”. “Do you know who said that?” Sánchez asked the Vox leader, creating a moment of suspense. “Neither more nor less than Leo. So once again the pontiff returns to the topic with a left-wing voice, and again – as in the case of Francis – as a battering ram to highlight foreign contradictions.

That the bishop of Rome emerges in progressive discourses, a frequent phenomenon with Francis and which now appears with Leo XIV, has not been the rule in Spain at all. “With the Church we have topao“, says the traditional expression, which in some ears resonates as a memory of the stony counter-reformism of the institution. “Spain, hammer of heretics, light of Trent. This is our greatness and our unity. We have no others”, wrote Menéndez Pelayo about a nation where the secular alliance between throne and altar has for centuries aroused the suspicion of liberals and progressives. National Catholicism, the privileged insertion of the Church in the State, and already in democracy the conservative pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, which consolidated a strong distrust towards the chair of Peter on the other side of the ideological arc, have done much to ascertain this suspicion. Result? The left’s suspicious gaze towards Rome was the norm.

The exception begins in 2013, with the arrival of Francisco, who in his twelve years at the helm of the Church was a Chinese in the guise of the far right. Has it slowed your rise? At all. But he placed himself in front, without half measures, angering Steve Bannon, Javier Milei – who said he was the “representative of the evil one” -, Matteo Salvini, Jair Bolsonaro and in Spain Santiago Abascal and Isabel Díaz Ayuso, who did not understand that “a Catholic who speaks Spanish” apologizes for the “sins” of the conquest of America.

A detractor of abortion and against equal rights for homosexuals, the Argentine pontiff nevertheless resisted the pressures that wanted to use the Holy See as a battering ram against “gender ideology” and the “Islamization of the West”, fixations of the new messiahs of exclusive nationalism. If in the field of immigration your visit to Lesboson economics, its main milestone was the 2020 encyclical Brothers allwhere he defended the “social function of property” and asked to remove politics from the “dictate of finance”. That text triggered a wave francischino of the Spanish left, which produced the precious image of Alberto Garzón, then leader of the IU, immersed in the reading of that papal document to put together his speech against “inequality and the global reactionary wave”. “I share with the Pope the call to build a more just and supportive world,” Pedro Sánchez said at the time, all this in the face of the uncomfortable clearing of the throat by right-wing Spanish Catholicism.

Progressive enthusiasm: “Long live the Pope!” Joan Baldoví of Compromís was once, before his fall from grace, accompanied by insults towards his opponents, as in the case of Íñigo Errejón (Más País): “Some say they are Christians but when the Pope criticizes inequality they reveal themselves to be devotees only of neoliberalism”. Or from Pablo Echenique (Podemos): “Strange times in which PP, Ciudadanos and Vox think that a papal encyclical is a dangerous social-communist manifesto”. Or by Gabriel Rufián (ERC): «If a pope hugs a poor person they call him a saint but if he asks why he is a saint they call him a communist». But the busiest was Yolanda Díaz, who in 2021 was the protagonist of a famous meeting in the Vatican with—a very smiling—Francisco. “The Pope is a very important person for me, he helped me make decisions in my life,” Díaz said after the pontiff’s death in April, on a day in which he was dismissed more warmly by the Communist Party than by Vox, with which almost everything was said about his legacy.

After Bergoglio, Provost

Him popery Progressive wasn’t just a Spanish phenomenon with Francisco. From Bernie Sanders, symbol of the most radical line of the US Democratic Party, who used it to base his defense of a “moral economy”, to Maurizio Acerbo, general secretary of Rifondazione Comunista in Italy, who stated that “the world needs his voice”, there are many figures on the left who have relied on the Argentine Jesuit to broaden the space of their messages.

It is logical that after a pontiff of such political impact, the election in May of the enigmatic American Robert Francis Prevost was greeted with caution. His style, hermetic in comparison, and some winks at the traditionalist sector, which had had enough of swallowing bile since 2013, led many to think that he was preparing the ground for a counter-reform. It seemed then that the time had come to put an end to that strange parenthesis in which progressives and reds of all stripes showed off with a papal nomination. But this is not so clear.

After the summer, the pontiff began to multiply the symptoms of alignment with Francis on crucial issues. The most sensitive, immigration. In October he denounced the “increasingly inhumane” measures against immigrants, which are also being “celebrated politically”. In case anyone had any doubts that he was targeting Donald Trump, the undisputed leader of the nationalist international, last week Leo

His exhortation went more unnoticed than his messages on immigration Dilexi youin which he denounces the “dictatorship of an economy that kills” and states that “solidarity” consists in “fighting against the structural causes of poverty”, two quotation marks as valid as the one chosen by Sánchez to underline the contradiction that the president of the government wanted to highlight: the same right that claims to be the guardian of the Christian essences of the West finds it very difficult to make its own the texts of the most important living man in Christianity.

Without raising his voice, Prevost takes Bergoglio’s place. The fact that Sánchez saves him proves two things. First, those who thought that Leo XIV would bury Francis’ legacy were wrong. The second, that in a context of retreat of progressivism in the ideological battle, Moncloa warned that the current pope can be as valid as the previous one as a source of authority to nourish his speeches and highlight the inconsistencies of the right sector which uses only the cross to draw a Christian “us” against a Muslim “them”, bordering on the humanist tradition of Christianity.