Pope begins six-day Spain visit with stops in Madrid, Canary Islands
Pope Leo XIV arrives in Spain on Saturday for a six-day visit, with stops planned in the capital Madrid, Barcelona and the Canary Islands.
Hundreds of thousands of people are expected to attend the scheduled open-air events in the predominantly Catholic country.
This is the first visit to a major European country outside Italy for the US-born pontiff, who has been at the helm of the Catholic Church since May last year.
Before his election as head of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics, Leo spent more than a quarter of a century in Peru as a missionary and bishop, and he speaks excellent Spanish.
The blessing of the Jesus Tower of the Sagrada Família basilica in Barcelona on Wednesday – on the 100th anniversary of the death of architect Antoni Gaudí – and two meetings in the Canary Islands with migrants from Africa are likely to attract considerable attention.
A meeting with people who have suffered sexual abuse in Catholic institutions, as called for by victims’ groups, is also on the programme.
The Catholic Church in Spain hopes that the visit will encourage more people to return to the faith. While in the 1970s almost 100% of Spaniards identified as Catholic, the figure today stands at just over half.
