BARCELONA – Six-sevening crowds and joking about Bad Bunny, AI and football rivalries – 70-year-old Pope Leo XIV has appealed to a younger crowd during his visit to Spain as part of his efforts to revive the Catholic Church.
On popemobile rides, the leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics has frequently been seen doing the 6-7 hand gesture, a reference to a meme that has spread widely on social media and is popular with teens.
Along with the masses and institutional events, there have also been multiple meetings with young people where the Pope has used more down-to-earth language and spoken about topical issues like mental health.
The pontiff, fluent in Spanish, also held a private meeting with Puerto Rican music superstar Bad Bunny, just after addressing a crowd of 80,000 people at Real Madrid’s famed Bernabeu stadium.
On the plane to Madrid, the Pope joked about facing competition from Bad Bunny who was giving concerts in the Spanish capital at the same time.
“If they are confronted with the question, ‘Do you want to go see Bad Bunny or do you want to go to see the Pope?’ I think many will see Bad Bunny,” he said.
“But I think there will also be a few here to see the Pope. And that says something,” he told reporters.
“He’s clearly making an effort to reach out to young people,” said US Vatican expert Elise Ann Allen, who has written a biography of the Pope.
But she said there were also many “spontaneous moments”, like when the football-mad Pope confessed to reporters that he was a supporter of Real Madrid, not Barcelona.
“I think these are just the Pope being himself,” she said.
On the flight from Madrid to Barcelona, the Pope rode part of the way in the cockpit, visibly enjoying himself and waving out of the window to a fighter jet accompanying the plane.
He joked with the pilots, according to a video released by the Spanish carrier, Iberia.
When one of the pilots told him he was a fan of Real Madrid, whose players wear white shirts, the Pope responded: “I’m all in white. In Barcelona, you have to be careful.”
The Pope has spoken about the challenges and opportunities of the digital age for the young and devoted his first encyclical – a sort of papal manifesto – to artificial intelligence.
He joked about AI’s limitations with an anecdote at a lunch in Madrid, where he told guests that he asked AI before his visit what he should say to Spanish bishops.
“The artificial intelligence told him that ‘Pope Francis would say’… So he stopped it and said: ‘I think there’s another pope’,” Yago de la Cierva, coordinator of the papal visit, told reporters.
“Then the artificial intelligence said, ‘Ah, that’s right, it’s now Pope Leo’,” he added.
In his speech to Spanish bishops, he urged them to “build a new reality through respectful dialogue and the use of new languages” to evangelise, urging them to recognise young people’s “search for meaning”.
“I think this pope listens a lot to young people,” said Alejandra Landae, a 28-year-old Mexican student in Barcelona, as she waited on June 10 near the Sagrada Familia basilica to see Leo.
Jose Maria Romero, a 20-year-old student from Seville who was also waiting nearby, agreed, saying the Pope “is trying to unite young people”.
Allen said more and more young people were taking an interest in the Catholic Church.
“There’s something stirring in the waters, and he sees that and he wants to take advantage of it,” she said.
Rafael Ruiz, professor of sociology at the Complutense University of Madrid, told El Pais daily that recent surveys showed a rise of Catholicism among younger Spaniards.
“We do not know whether this is a Catholic resurgence or simply a stabilisation of the secularisation process,” he said.
“What we are seeing more clearly is an increase in the visibility of Catholicism and in the normalisation of Catholicism among young people,” he said.
Around 56 per cent of Spaniards identify as Catholic compared to 90 per cent in the 1970s, according to a survey in May by the Centre for Sociological Research, an autonomous government body.
An opinion piece in Spanish daily La Vanguardia said the Pope was “making God fashionable”. AFP