The Spanish Episcopal Conference has already put music to the script. The official hymn for the visit of Leo XIV is not neutral: it is a statement of intentions. And not precisely ambiguous. Among predictable chords and calculated lyrics, the central motif appears: “those who cross the sea seeking a home.” It is not a detail. It is the axis.
Nothing is said, on the other hand, about those who are already here. About those who do not cross seas because they were born in this land and see, year after year, how their surroundings transform without anyone asking them. About the neighborhoods where coexistence has ceased to be a fact to become a failed experiment. About the streets where insecurity is no longer a perception, but a statistic. About the merchants who close their shutters early. About the women who change sidewalks. About the children who stop playing where they used to play.
The hymn does not mention them. They do not exist.
The Spanish Church has decided to look in only one direction. And it does so just before a papal visit that, judging by this preview, will not come to confirm the faithful amid their concrete difficulties, but to reiterate a message already known, already repeated, already assumed as a sociopolitical dogma: the absolute priority of the migrant, turned into an unquestionable moral symbol.
But reality is more uncomfortable. Because while singing to those who arrive, there are those who suffer here. They suffer the growing violence in the streets. They suffer the consequences of a delinquency that is avoided naming. They suffer the victims of rape. They suffer the assaulted merchants. They suffer those who wait months for a medical test in an overloaded healthcare system. They suffer the aborted children, eliminated in silence under legal cover. They suffer the mothers who carry that wound. They suffer the sick and vulnerable pushed toward euthanasia as a solution.
That list does not enter the song either.
The question is direct: where is the mercy for them? Where does it appear in this liturgical-musical narrative that pretends to spiritually prepare an entire country for the Pope’s visit?
Because it is not about opposing sufferings, but about noting a systematic omission. An interested selection of victims worthy of mention. A moral framing where some deserve public compassion and others are left out of focus, as if their pain were less legitimate or, worse still, uncomfortable.
The hymn is not an accident. It is a symptom. It points to what is coming. To a visit that, if it follows this line, will not seek to listen to Spain, but to confirm it in a prefabricated discourse. And it will do so, moreover, with the economic backing of those same Spaniards who do not appear in the lyrics but do in the bill.
Leo XIV will arrive in a real country, not an abstraction. In a tense, fragmented society tired of being spoken to without being listened to. The question is whether someone has told him. Or if, as the hymn suggests, everything is already decided before landing.