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

The Pope returns to Congress, and re-enters through the door on the left. In this case, he was invited by Pedro Sánchez, who on Wednesday gave Santiago Abascal a quote from Leo XIV’s advice The delicacy is for you The Pope denounces that there are those who seek “social imbalance,” giving complete independence to “markets and financial speculation,” and “thus denying the right to control the states responsible for ensuring the common good.” “Do you know who said that?” Sanchez asked the Vox party leader, creating a moment of suspense. “No more and no less than Leo. So the Pope returns again to the voice argument from the left, and again – as was the case with Francis – as a scapegoat to highlight foreign contradictions.

The appearance of the Bishop of Rome in progressive sermons, a frequent phenomenon with Francis and now apparent with Leo XIV, was by no means the norm in Spain. “With our church com. topao“Says the traditional expression, which resonates in some ears as a reminder of the strict counter-reformism of the establishment. “Spain the hammer of heretics, light of Trent. This is our greatness and unity. Menéndez Pelayo wrote about a nation in which the secular alliance between throne and altar has aroused suspicion among liberals and progressives for centuries. National Catholicism, the distinctive integration of church into state, and the conservative popes of John Paul II and Benedict The result? A suspicious look from the left towards Rome was the norm.

The exception begins in 2013, with the arrival of Francisco, who during his twelve years at the helm of the church was a Chinese in the shoes of the far right. Has your rise slowed down? Absolutely. But he stood in front, without half measures, angering Steve Bannon, Javier Maile – whom he called the “representative of the evil” -, Matteo Salvini, Jair Bolsonaro and, in Spain, Santiago Abascal and Isabel Díaz Ayuso, who did not understand that the “Spanish-speaking Catholic” was apologizing for the “sins” of invading America.

As a critic of abortion and against equal rights for homosexuals, the Argentine pope nonetheless resisted pressure to use the Holy See as a striking instrument against “gender ideology” and the “Islamization of the West,” neo-Christian fixations on exclusive nationalism. If he is in the field of immigration visit him LesbiansIn the field of economics, his main milestone was his 2020 encyclical Fratelli everythingHe defended the “social function of property” and demanded the removal of politics from “the dictates of finance.” This text caused a wave francisquista On the Spanish left, which produced an invaluable photograph of Alberto Garzón, then leader of the International Federation, immersed in reading that papal document to compile his speech against “inequality and the wave of global reaction.” “I share the Pope’s call to build a more just and supportive world,” Pedro Sánchez said at the time, all in the face of an uncomfortable purge of right-wing Spanish Catholicism.

Progressive enthusiasm — “Long live the Pope!” “Some say they are Christians but when the Pope criticizes inequality, it turns out they are only loyal to neoliberalism,” Juan Baldovi of Compromes once declared – accompanied by jeers from his opponents, as in the case of Iñigo Errejón (Mas Paes), before his fall from grace. Or from Pablo Echenique (Podemos): “Strange times in which the Progressive Party, the Ciudadanos and the Vox believe that the encyclical is a dangerous social communist manifesto.” Or from Gabriel Ruffian (ERC): “If a pope hugs a poor person they call him a saint, but if he asks why, they call him a communist.” But the most dedicated was Yolanda Diaz, who in 2021 starred in a famous reunion at the Vatican. With – very smiling – Francisco. “The pope is a very important person for me, he helped me make decisions in my life,” Diaz said after the pope’s death in April, a day when he was more expelled from the Communist Party than from Vox, about whose legacy almost everything has been said.

After Bergoglio, Prevost

he papacy Progressivism was not just a Spanish phenomenon for Francisco. From Bernie Sanders, the flag bearer of the most extreme line in the US Democratic Party, who used it as a basis for his defense of the “moral economy”, to Maurizio Acerbo, Secretary General of the Communist Reconstitution Party in Italy, who said that “the world needs his voice”, there are many left-wing figures who have relied on the Argentine Jesuit to expand the space of their messages.

It stands to reason that after a pope with such political influence, the election in May of the enigmatic American Robert Francis Prevost was greeted with caution. His style, tame by comparison, and some winks to the traditional sector, tired of swallowing bile since 2013, led many to believe he was paving the way for a counter-reform. It seemed then that the time had come to put an end to those strange quotes in which progressives and reds of all kinds boasted of a papal appointment. But this is not very clear.

After the summer, the pope began to double down on alignment with Francis on crucial issues. The most sensitive is immigration. In October, he condemned the “increasingly inhumane” measures against migrants, which are also being “celebrated politically”. In case anyone had any doubt that Donald Trump, the undisputed head of the Nationalist International, last week targeted Leo

His advice went more unnoticed than his messages on immigration The delicacy is for youin which he condemns “the dictatorship of an economy that kills” and asserts that “solidarity” consists of “fighting the structural causes of poverty,” the quotation marks are exactly the same as those chosen by Sánchez to emphasize the contradiction that the head of government wanted to highlight: the same right that claims to be the guardian of the Christian essence of the West finds it extremely difficult to make the texts of the most important living man in Christendom its own.

Without raising his voice, Prevost takes over from Bergoglio. That Sanchez saved him shows two things. First, those who thought that Leo XIV would bury Francis’ inheritance were wrong. Second, in the context of the decline of progressivism in the ideological battle, Moncloa warned that the current pope could be as valid as the previous pope as a source of authority to fuel his rhetoric and highlight the contradictions in the right-wing sector that only uses the cross to draw the Christian “us” against the Muslim “them,” in a way that comes close to the humanist tradition of Christianity.