When Pope Leo met in Madrid with Spain’s left-wing prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, on Monday morning, they represented, at least to many liberals, a powerful duo joining forces to lead the opposition to President Trump.
“They have the same voice,” when it comes to speaking out against Mr. Trump, Cardinal José Cobo of Madrid said.
Pope Leo has drawn the president’s fury for criticizing the war in Iran and later saying he had “no fear” of the Trump administration. Mr. Sánchez has battled Mr. Trump on everything from NATO spending to the migration policy to his opposition to the wars in Gaza and Iran.
Their motivations, though, are seemingly different.
If the pope was dragged into the fight by Mr. Trump, Mr. Sánchez happily jumped in. Mr. Sánchez is perhaps Europe’s most accomplished political escape artist, after wriggling free from countless crises during his eight years in power. His most recent high-wire act has been to seize on international quarrels with Mr. Trump to raise his global profile and distract from troubles at home, especially the corruption scandals and accusations now swirling around his former allies and family.
Appearing with the pope “will help Sánchez with his external public image,” said Joseba Louzao, a professor at Cardinal Cisneros University and author of “A Brief History of the Catholic Church in Spain.”
Meeting the pope at the Vatican’s embassy in Madrid on Monday, Mr. Sánchez sought to underline their connection by giving the pontiff a Spanish olive bonsai tree that was, the Spanish government said in a statement to reporters, “a universal symbol of peace, dialogue and understanding, values shared by Spain and the Vatican.”
Mr. Sánchez’s relationship with the pope may not matter much in Spain, an increasingly polarized country where feelings about the prime minister were already deeply entrenched, Mr. Louzao said. The great hope for Mr. Sánchez, he suggested, would be Mr. Trump seizing on Monday’s Madrid meeting to attack them together — potentially upgrading the prime minister’s global status and invigorating his base.
On the face of things, the two men have little in common. Mr. Sánchez is a self-declared atheist, a staunch defender of abortion rights and an opponent of Catholic involvement in public education. But to hear him tell it, he is also singing from the same hymn sheet as Pope Leo.
He and the pope have “a certain degree of harmony” he said during a May 27 trip to meet Leo in the Vatican, whether it be their shared opposition to war, their concerns about giant tech companies, or their defense of migrants. “The Catholic Church and the Government of Spain are once again, I believe, very much in tune,” Mr. Sánchez added.
He called Leo a “a moral compass” as they navigated with “common sense against irrationality and the law of the jungle.”
When Spain let passengers from a cruise ship infested with hantavirus dock in the Canary Islands in May, Mr. Sánchez responded to local criticism by citing “the explicit recognition expressed by none other than the pope for the solidarity and empathy shown by the people of the Canary Islands.”
Spain’s Catholic prelates have tried to avoid too strong a comparison.
Joan Planellas, the archbishop of Tarragona, acknowledged that when it came to immigration, opposition to war and the need to regulate tech giants. “Certainly, on these topics that seem more left-wing, if we speak politically, there is a certain harmony.” But not on abortion, euthanasia and other “delicate topics,” he said.
Cardinal Cobo added that Mr. Sánchez’s agreement with the pope on some issues did not mean he should use him as a political shield, especially because they still disagreed on many matters.
Eloy Alberto Santiago, the bishop of Tenerife in the Canary Islands, where Leo, joined by Mr. Sánchez, will meet with migrants, said that while the church was a driver behind the Spanish government’s recent move toward giving papers to hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants,it did not mean “we identify with a party or a government.”
Government officials have also said the prime minister is wary of drawing too close to the pope. They said it ran the risk of seeming tacky and transparently political, and could provoke a backlash within the prime minister’s left-wing base, which disagrees deeply with the Catholic church on issues such as gay rights, abortion and feminism. In that regard, Mr. Sánchez and Leo have a common interest in not seeming too buddy-buddy.
“The alignment is already so visible that there is no need to overemphasize it or try to co-opt his figure,” said Jorge Tamames, a fellow at the Elcano Royal Institute, a think tank in Madrid
The church, he said, will move cautiously amid the “wasp’s nest” of Spanish politics, but the pope’s positions on the major issues of the day “are so irreconcilable with the right or with the far-right” that “a contrast is inevitable, and the government doesn’t need to force it.”
Mr. Sánchez’s allies also hope the pope’s visit helps point out the distance between right-wing leaders who flaunt their Catholicism and the actual leader of the Roman Catholic Church. Spain’s far-right party, Vox, has tried to win over Catholic voters by presenting itself as the protector of Catholic traditions, even though it has also criticized Catholic bishops for supporting migrants.
To prevent Mr. Sánchez from deriving political capital from the visit, conservatives have sought to characterize him as trying to use Leo as a shield.
Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the president of the Madrid region, who also visited the pope in the Vatican this month, has accused Mr. Sánchez of “trying to appropriate” Pope Leo’s visit. “In the last eight years, he has been incapable of having a single gesture toward Catholics,” Ms. Ayuso said.
Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the leader of the main conservative Spanish opposition party, mocked Mr. Sánchez as trying to wrap himself in the clean robes of the popular pope.
“If he wants to get closer to the pope, he should remember the seventh commandment,” Mr. Feijóo said, “‘Thou shalt not steal,’ and the eighth commandment, ‘Thou shalt not lie.’”
Speaking to the Spanish Parliament on Monday, under its frescoed dome, Leo appeared to allude to those political divisions.
“It falls to me today to speak a calm and firm word to those who bear the grave responsibility of legally ordering social coexistence,” Leo said, before Mr. Sánchez and all his political enemies.
“Political pluralism should not degenerate into the constant disparagement of one’s adversary,” Leo said, adding, “firmness does not require contempt; disagreement does not entail humiliation.”
He emphasized that he was not trying to wade into politics or stepping over dividing lines between church and state. If anything, the pope seemed careful to keep a foot on both partisan sides. He appealed to conservatives by speaking in defense of “the unborn child” — and to liberals by calling migration a “tragic drama” that challenged the conscience of nations.
He echoed Mr. Sánchez’s slogan of “no war,” by calling for “diplomatic courage” to resolve global disputes with “means offered by international law.”
“It is therefore a cause for concern that, in various parts of the world — and in Europe as well — rearmament is once again being presented as an almost inevitable response to the fragility of the international situation,” Leo said.
When the pope finished, Mr. Sánchez joined the rest of the chamber in a long standing ovation.
But Luis Argüello, the archbishop of Valladolid and president of the Spanish Bishops Conference, warned Mr. Sánchez and the left against suggesting that “‘the church is closer to us.’”
Spain’s left, the archbishop said in an interview, should apply the church’s teaching to actions “inside our own nation,” including, he said, “on matters relating to corruption.”
Carlos Barragán contributed reporting.
