In all my conversations, with priests and laypeople, which these days were numerous, two issues came up repeatedly: the extraordinary success of the trip and of the Pope, and Cobo’s relentless and constant attempts to ride on his coattails and hog the camera. One priest summed it up for me like this: “He went way overboard.” And the flawless performance of the Archbishop of Barcelona and the bishops of the Canary Islands and Tenerife, who understood perfectly well that their role was secondary and carried it out with complete dignity, achieving a double effect that I am sure they did not intend but that resulted from their conduct: they came across splendidly themselves and left the Cardinal of Madrid looking wretched—like a boor who, not knowing how to receive a high-ranking figure, tries to be that figure himself, absurdly and pointlessly disputing his protagonism and managing to make his own pettiness obvious to everyone.
Many also mentioned to me his eagerness to completely erase the president of the Episcopal Conference.
I think that if anything was a failure in this trip brimming with successes, it was Cobo. As I said: a boor.