The Archdiocese of Madrid has released the official spot for the visit of Leo XIV to Spain. Two and a half minutes of carefully crafted images, impeccable aesthetics, emotive music, and a message centered on the gaze, encounter, human differences, and social coexistence. All very correct. All very sensitive. All extraordinarily empty.
The result feels more like a philanthropic social-awareness campaign than an announcement for the visit of the successor of Peter.
How can an official spot for the Pope’s visit become a message so carefully stripped of Christian content?
Much emotion, little faith
The video shows a subway car full of different people learning to “look at each other” and discovering that they share fears, dreams, and fatigue. The final message invites viewers to “raise their gaze,” “lower barriers,” and “find answers.”
But answers… to what?
The problem is not talking about human fraternity. Christianity has always spoken of it. The problem is constructing a discourse in which the supernatural dimension disappears completely and where the man seems to suffice himself through the simple emotional experience of encountering the other.
The result is a message perfectly compatible with any institutional campaign, international NGO, corporate ad, or social-cohesion initiative—even a soft-drink commercial could fit.
The man as man’s answer
Perhaps the most revealing phrase in the video comes when the voice-over asks: “And if the person in front of me is the answer I need to understand myself?”
There, the anthropological and spiritual problem of the announcement is condensed.
Because for Christianity, man is not the ultimate answer for man. Christ is.
The neighbor matters precisely because he points to God, because he has been created in the image of God, and because love for the other is born from love to Christ. When this supernatural foundation is eliminated, fraternity is reduced to a horizontal sentimentalism that is as emotive as it is incapable of responding to the deep questions of the human soul.
An increasingly secularized ecclesial aesthetic
The video also reflects a trend increasingly frequent in contemporary ecclesial communication: the obsession to appear inclusive, kind, and universally acceptable even at the cost of emptying the Christian message of its most specifically religious content.
Everything is designed to not bother anyone.
No sin, because es could sound harsh. No truth, because it could sound exclusive. No call to conversion, because it could seem demanding. No Christ, because it could divide.
Only a generic spirituality of encounter, empathy, and shared emotions remains.
Paradoxically, in the attempt to be accessible to all, the message ends up losing precisely what makes the Church unique.