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

The Pope returns to the parliament and enters again through the door on the left. In this case, Pedro Sánchez invited him and gave Santiago Abascal this Wednesday a quote from the exhortation of Leo XIV. Direxi-kun In it, the pope denounces the existence of those who seek “imbalances” in society by giving complete autonomy to “markets and financial speculation,” and “thus denying the right of the state to manage the common good.” “Do you know who said that?” Sanchez asked the Vox leader, creating a moment of tension. “Nothing more, nothing less, Leo” So the Pope returns to the discussion of leftist voices, again – as with Francis – as a battering ram to highlight foreign contradictions.

The appearance of the Bishop of Rome in progressive speeches was a common occurrence in the case of Francis, and now appears in Pope Leo XIV, but was never customary in Spain. “Together with the Church, we Topao“This traditional expression rings in some ears as a reminder of the stony counter-reformism of the system.” The Light of Trento, the Hammer of the Spanish Heretic. This is our greatness and our unity. There is no other,” Menéndez Pelayo wrote of a country whose secular alliance with the throne and the altar has aroused the suspicions of liberals and progressives for centuries. The conservative papacy of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, which solidified a strong distrust of national Catholicism, the church’s privileged incorporation into the state, and the Peter’s Chair, already on the other side of the ideological arc in democracies, had much to offer. How can I confirm that suspicion? Leftists’ suspicions about Rome were commonplace.

The exception begins with Francisco’s arrival in 2013. Francis, who served as head of the church for 12 years, was a Chinese national with far-right positions. Are you starting up slower? Not at all. But he took the lead with half-hearted measures, infuriating Steve Bannon, Javier Millei (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 “Spanish-speaking Catholics” were apologizing for the “sins” of conquering America.

Argentina’s pope, who has criticized abortion and equal rights for homosexuals, resisted pressure to use the Holy See as a battering ram against “gender ideology” and the “Islamization of the West”, the obsessions of the new saviors of exclusionary nationalism. In the area of ​​immigration, his visit lesbos islandregarding economics, his main milestone was the 2020 encyclical. Fratelli TuttiThere he defended the “social function of property” and called for the removal of politics from the “commands of finance.” That text caused waves Francis Custa He is the Spanish leftist who created the rare image of Alberto Garzón, then leader of the IU, reading papal documents in order to compile a speech against “inequality and a global wave of reaction.” “I share with the Pope the call to build a more just and cooperative world,” Pedro Sánchez said at the time, amid unpleasant coughing from Spain’s Catholic right.

Progressive fervor—“Long live the Pope!” The compromising João Bardovi once declared, before his fall from grace, with derision toward his opponents, as in the case of Iñigo Errejón (Más País), “Some say they are Christians, but when the Pope criticizes inequality, they turn out to be just followers of neoliberalism.” Or a comment from Pablo Echenique (Podemos): “Strange times when PP, Ciudadanos and Vox consider the Pope’s encyclical to be a dangerous social-communist manifesto.” Or from Gabriel Ruffian (ERC): ” If the pope hugs a poor person, people call him a saint, but if you ask him why, he calls him a communist.” But the most devoted was Yolanda Díaz, who starred in a famous meeting at the Vatican in 2021. With a very smiling Francisco. “The Pope was a very important person to me and helped me make decisions in my life,” Diaz said after the Pope’s death in April. On that day, the Pope was dismissed more leniently by the Communist Party than by Vox, but almost all of his accomplishments have been told.

After Bergoglio, Prevot

he poppy Progressives were not just a Spanish phenomenon of Francisco. There are a number of figures on the left who have turned to Argentina’s Jesuits to widen their message, from Bernie Sanders, the standard-bearer of the most radical line of the US Democratic Party, who used it as a basis for defending a “moral economy,” to Maurizio Acerbo, general secretary of Italy’s Re-Foundation for Communism, who said “the world needs his voice.”

After the inauguration of a pope with such political clout, it is understandable that the May election of the enigmatic American Robert Francis Prevost was viewed with caution. His style, by comparison, was hermetic, and with a slight nod to the traditionalist sector, which had grown tired of swallowing bile since 2013, many thought he might be preparing the ground for counter-reform. It seemed then that the time had come to put an end to the strange bracket that all sorts of progressives and reds flaunt with papal appointments. But it’s not that clear.

Since the summer, the pope has begun to show increasing signs of unity with Francis on key issues. The most sensitive immigrants. In October, he denounced the “increasingly inhumane” measures against migrants that have been “politically celebrated.” In case you were wondering why Leo targeted Donald Trump, the undisputed leader of international nationalists, last week.

His exhortation received less attention than his message about immigration. Direxi-kunIn it, he denounces the “killing economic dictatorship” and asserts that “solidarity” consists of “fighting the structural causes of poverty,” but these two quotation marks are as valid as those chosen by Sánchez to emphasize the contradiction that the government president wanted to emphasize: the same right that claims to be the guardians of the essence of Christianity in the West finds it very difficult to appropriate the writings of the most important living figure in the Christian world.

Prevost quietly takes over from Bergoglio. The fact that Sanchez rescued him shows two things. One is that those who thought Leo XIV was trying to bury Francis’ legacy were wrong. Second, in the context of progressivism’s retreat in the ideological struggle, Moncloa warned that the current pope, like his predecessor, could be effective as a source of authority to feed his speeches and highlight the contradictions of right-wing sectors that, adjacent to the Christian humanist tradition, only use the cross to portray the Christian “us” against the Muslim “them.”