At first glance, the discourse appears impeccable.
It speaks of the Apostle James. It speaks of Spain's Catholic tradition. It cites Saint John of the Cross, Saint Teresa of Ávila, and Saint Ignatius of Loyola. It speaks of human dignity, of peace, of religious freedom and the value of faith.
Many Catholics will read these pages and conclude that all is in order.
But therein precisely lies the problem.
Great transformations within the Church do not usually occur through explicit denials of faith. Priests or bishops seldom appear saying they no longer believe in Christ or that the Gospel is false.
Profound transformations occur when the center changes.
When the same words remain, but cease to occupy the principal place.
That is exactly what happens in this discourse.
Because the decisive question is not what Leon XIV says.
The question is what concerns him.
And one need only read the complete text to discover it.
The word sin practically disappears.
The necessity of conversion disappears.
The evangelizing mission barely appears.
Eternal salvation is relegated.
In contrast, other preoccupations appear constantly: polarization, identities, dialogue, complexity, coexistence, encounter, multilateralism and social friendship.
This is not a minor detail.
It is a question of priorities.
Imagine a doctor speaking for an hour about a hospital's decoration while barely mentioning his patients' illnesses.
The decoration probably has some importance.
But everyone would understand that something does not fit.
Well, something similar occurs here.
Spain is experiencing one of the greatest religious crises in its history.
Religious practice is collapsing.
Birth rates are plummeting.
The family is weakening.
Legislation is moving increasingly away from Christian morality.
Thousands of young people are growing up without even knowing the basic elements of the faith.
Yet the great danger identified by the Pope is none of these.
The great danger appears to be polarization.
And here it is worth pausing.
Because polarization is not necessarily an evil.
Sometimes it is the consequence of the existence of a real conflict.
The primitive Church polarized the Roman Empire.
The martyrs polarized their societies.
Saint Athanasius polarized the Arians.
Saint Thomas More polarized Henry VIII.
Christ's own preaching produced division.
Not because they sought confrontation, but because truth inevitably generates a reaction.
This is why it is so concerning that polarization appears almost as the great public sin of our time.
Because then the objective ceases to be discerning who is right.
And it becomes simply reducing conflict.
But reducing conflict does not always amount to defending the truth.
There is another aspect still more disquieting.
Leon XIV invites us to flee from « identity approaches ».
The phrase may seem innocent.
It is not.
Because Christianity is an identity.
The Church is an identity.
Christendom was an identity.
The martyrs died precisely because they refused to renounce an identity.
When a person speaks constantly against identities, he ends up questioning also those identities that deserve to be preserved.
Still more striking is the express praise of multilateralism.
Let us pause for a moment.
We are speaking of a Pope's first great discourse in Spain.
He could have used it to speak of the re-evangelization of Europe.
Of the demographic crisis.
Of the continent's apostasy.
Of the defense of life.
Of persecution against Christians.
Yet he devotes specific words of recognition to Spain's commitment to multilateralism.
Why?
Because it reveals what the mental framework is from which he is observing reality.
It is not the language of a missionary.
It is the language of contemporary international governance.
And this appears again and again.
Also when he speaks of Islam.
The Pope recalls spaces of coexistence and intellectual cooperation between Christians, Muslims and Jews during the Middle Ages.
All of that occurred.
But the selection is extraordinarily revealing.
Because eight centuries of Christian resistance disappear.
Covadonga disappears.
The Reconquista disappears.
The martyrs disappear.
The secular effort to recover a land that had been conquered by Islam disappears.
It is not a historical error.
It is a choice.
And choices reveal priorities.
The entire discourse functions this way.
It does not deny the faith.
It does not deny Christ.
It does not deny Catholic tradition.
It simply places them in the background.
The foreground is occupied by other categories.
Coexistence.
Mediation.
Complexity.
Inclusion.
Global governance.
Social friendship.
The final result is a silent inversion of the order of priorities.
The Church ceases to appear as the institution tasked with announcing a truth that saves.
And it begins to appear as a great moral mediator destined to facilitate dialogue among social actors.
Many readers will not immediately perceive this change because religious vocabulary remains present.
But precisely for that reason it is more dangerous.
Evident heresies usually fail.
Gradual substitutions usually succeed.
And the question this discourse leaves is as simple as it is disquieting:
if all religious references were to disappear from the text, how much would its central message really change?
The answer perhaps explains better than anything else why this discourse deserves to be read with enormous attention.
