Cardinal José Cobo, Archbishop of Madrid, Vice-President of the Spanish Episcopal Conference and member of the Dicastery for Bishops, has granted El País an interview on the eve of Pope Leo XIV’s visit to Spain. The trip will begin on 6 June in the capital and will continue until the 12th, with stops in Barcelona, Gran Canaria and Tenerife. In the conversation, Cobo explains the meaning the hierarchy wishes to give the visit and sets out its position on the issues that are expected to define it: immigration, poverty, relations with parties that claim to be Catholic, and the scandal of abuse.
On the nature of the visit, the cardinal maintains that it will not be a “spectacle trip” but a “profound experience,” and he rejects the logic of what he calls a “culture of moments” and of “phrases” that are exhausted in an instant. Instead, he defends a journey with prior preparation and subsequent continuity: he states that the Church has held meetings with politicians, rectors and representatives of the business world to define what they will raise with the Pope, and that the dialogue must continue after his departure. The visit, he says, must leave “homework.” He also describes a Church capable of bringing together people who do not usually mix—according to his expression, “those on the left with those on the left and those on the right with those on the right”—and presents this gathering as a “family photo” that also includes immigrants and the poor.
“Lift your gaze”, the motto of the trip
The cardinal glosses the trip’s motto, “lift your gaze,” as a response to what he perceives as a “fundamental hopelessness” and a “sense of loop” in today’s society. He calls for looking “beyond” routine and for attending to people rather than ideas.
He announces that Leo XIV will address the Congress of Deputies—making him the first pontiff to do so—and that he will ask political leaders to “lift their gaze toward the social world” and to seek the common good above particular interests.
He insists that the Pope will not propose uniformity of thought, but a point of convergence: in his view, Leo XIV “is not going to say: ‘Let’s all think the same,’” but will invite everyone to look “together at a point where we converge.”
Immigration, a “red line” for the Church
The central focus of the interview is immigration. Cobo affirms that, for the Church, the issue of migrants constitutes “a red line,” and then broadens the framework: “not only migrants,” but “the issue of the poor.”
He maintains that “often people do not speak so much about migrants as about the poor,” and illustrates this with an example: “there are many migrants in the Salamanca district who have bought up the whole neighbourhood. Not those,” he clarifies, placing the Church’s concern with those who arrive in need.
On this matter, the cardinal uses a weighty expression: he says it is “a truth of faith and an unbreakable line.” He announces that the Pope will address the migratory experience, the way of attending to those who arrive “from the sea or from airports,” and that he will propose paths already put forward by the Church, with a message he summarises as: “Look them in the eye because they are human persons.”
Leo XIV will enter Madrid via Lucero
Regarding the Pope’s entry into Madrid, Cobo explains that Leo XIV will enter the city “as Bishop of Rome” via Calle de Cullera, in the Lucero neighbourhood, and will visit Cáritas’s CEDIA centre, with the intention of “giving visibility to people who are having a hard time.”
The cardinal recalls that his first posting as a priest, in the early 1990s, was a parish near that area.
Cobo responds to Vox and the “Catholic” parties
Asked about the Pope’s firmness in the face of the instrumentalisation of the Catholic vote by far-right groups and about attacks by parties such as Vox on a large part of the bishops, Cobo replies that he is glad the message causes discomfort, because “the message of the Gospel has never been liked.”
He maintains that when the Church says nothing, or issues a message that is “ambiguous or very flexible,” it ceases to matter to anyone, and that its stance on peace, migration, the poor and the model of the world legitimately bothers those who do not share it.
“The Church is not going to stop saying it, and it may sting some,” he states.
When asked whether the parties that consider themselves Catholic have moved away from the Church, he answers no, and attributes the friction to a lack of habit of dialogue “between different positions.” He characterises the positions of those groups as “perhaps” having “smaller, more provincial messages.”
He calls for dialogue, but specifies that dialogue does not consist in renouncing one’s own position or in “imposing what the other says,” but in “laying our cards on the table.”
He adds that the Church “will never dictate the laws that must be made,” but will “point to the horizon,” and that “the great decisions are not taken by the market or by politics, but by people.”
The risk of politicising the papal message
The cardinal also warns of the risk that the Pope’s messages may be politicised. He acknowledges that Leo XIV “will give clear messages” and that each actor—politicians, institutions—will be able to “cut or underline whatever they wish” and even “appropriate part of what he says.”
To counter that risk, he proposes paying attention to “a global reading” of the Pope’s figure and to the context of his words.
The question of abuse
On the subject of abuse, Cobo confirms that the Pope could hold a private meeting with victims, without specifying whether during the visit or about ten days later in Rome, and states that Leo XIV “will be close to them” and “will listen.”
He acknowledges the slowness and unevenness of the process undertaken by the Church and resorts to the image of a forest in which, as one advances, the magnitude of the pain is revealed; a pain that, he says, is not closed “with a chequebook and in two days.”
He highlights the effort made in the Archdiocese of Madrid and assures that the victims “have made us change.”
He also broadens the scope of the problem beyond sexual abuse of minors to that committed against adults and abuses of power, describing it as “the tip of a very painful iceberg” that is more widespread “than we imagined.”
He concludes that the bishops are moving forward “very slowly and sometimes unevenly,” although he says he has seen some “standard-bearers” who are pulling the rest along.