- The prophetic geography of a journey
- The Canary Islands: Gateway to Europe, Edge of the Abyss
- Las Raíces and Arguineguín: two names, one theology
- A pastoral approach, not a gesture
- From Lampedusa to Las Raíces: the continuity of a prophetic tradition
- The Augustinian legacy and Christian philoxenia
- Mass at the port: the liturgy as a political act
- The authority of bodies: when the Pope sets the example
- The motto "Look up" and the dynamics of conversion
- The limits of nuance and prophetic clarity
- A Church in Motion
- ✝ Biblical references
There are gestures that history remembers because they shatter something—a habit, a distance, a comfortable resignation. On July 8, 2013, Jorge Mario Bergoglio boarded a boat in Lampedusa and cast a wreath of flowers into a sea that had swallowed hundreds of men, women, and children. That day, Pope Francis's words about "the globalization of indifference" resonated like a prophetic, raw, and unsettling cry. More than twelve years later, on June 12, 2026, Leo XIV does not cast a wreath into the sea: he goes down into the camp himself. He enters Las Raíces.
This migrant shelter, housed in a former military barracks on the island of Tenerife in the Canary Islands, is one of the most symbolically charged places in Europe. Hundreds of people from sub-Saharan Africa—Senegalese, Malians, Gambians, but also Afghans and Pakistanis—wait there, suspended between two worlds, after crossing the Atlantic in makeshift boats. It is there, in this barracks converted into an antechamber of exile, that the Successor of Peter will then celebrate Mass at the port of Santa Cruz de Tenerife at 1:15 p.m., the final liturgical act of a seven-day apostolic journey to Spain. As fate would have it—if indeed anything is truly random in the planning of a papal trip—this gesture will bring it all to a close.
The prophetic geography of a journey
The Canary Islands: Gateway to Europe, Edge of the Abyss
The choice of the Canary Islands as the final stage of the apostolic journey was not a matter of tourist curiosity or a pleasant island getaway. It stemmed from a deliberate theological act, from a topography of kenosis — this act of self-denial by which Christ himself made himself vulnerable among the vulnerable. The archipelago, a Spanish territory, has become in just a few years one of the main maritime gateways to Europe. In the first half of 2025 alone, nearly two thousand people perished in these waters. Two thousand. The figure is there, chilling, and it alone is enough to justify a pope's visit.
Leo XIV thus became the second pope to set foot on Canary Island soil, after Saint John Paul II during his apostolic journey to Spain in 1982. But the context of 2026 bears no resemblance to that of forty-four years ago. At that time, Spain joyfully opened itself to the world after decades of Franco's rule; today, the Canary Islands are the scene of a silent humanitarian crisis, a scene that cameras struggle to reach and that public opinion often prefers to ignore. That Leo XIV visited on the last day of his trip, after Madrid, Barcelona, and the Sagrada Família, signifies one thing: the beauty of Gaudí's monument could not be the final word. The final word is the face of a man from Dakar waiting in a barracks.
Las Raíces and Arguineguín: two names, one theology
The day before, on June 11, Leo XIV had met with those involved in welcoming migrants at the port of Arguineguín, on the island of Gran Canaria. These two consecutive stops—Arguineguín on the 11th, Las Raíces on the 12th—form a coherent theological sequence that can be read as a pastoral diptych. The first meeting is that of the escorts : volunteers, associations, social workers, Church agents who work towards welcoming and integrating. The second, in Las Raíces, is the meeting with the faces themselves — the migrants in the flesh, those for whom all speeches only make sense if they materialize in real presence.
Scripture has no shortage of words to name this logic. In the book of Exodus, the Lord says to Moses: «I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob. I have seen the misery of my people in Egypt, I have heard their cry before their oppressors. Yes, I know their suffering.» (Exodus 3:6-7). What theology retains from this verse is the structure of the divine gaze: seeing, hearing, to know. Not to administer, not to legislate, but to descend—"I have come down to deliver him," the text says a few verses later. Upon entering Las Raíces, Leo XIV liturgically performs this descending gesture. He sees. He hears. He knows.
A pastoral approach, not a gesture
From Lampedusa to Las Raíces: the continuity of a prophetic tradition
It would be simplistic to mechanically compare the two events. In 2013, Francis's gesture in Lampedusa was inaugural, almost solitary, imbued with the urgency of a catastrophe that was recurring weekly without the world truly being moved. In 2026, Leo XIV's visit is part of a much denser institutional and pastoral framework. As Father Mussie Zerai—an Eritrean priest, founder of the humanitarian agency Habeshia, long known as the "guardian angel of migrants" in the Mediterranean—points out, Leo XIV's visit to these centers is "the logical continuation of Francis's Lampedusa visit in 2013, but in a more structured way: the Pope is not making a gesture, he is building a pastoral approach.".
This distinction is crucial. A prophetic gesture calls for action; a pastoral approach structure. Since the creation, in 2016, of the Migrants and Refugees section within the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, and its subsequent full integration within the framework of the Apostolic Constitution Praedicate evangelium In 2023, the Church established an institutional body dedicated to this issue. Its prefect, Cardinal Michael Czerny, a Canadian Jesuit who devoted decades to defending migrants and refugees, laid the doctrinal groundwork for this commitment by recalling that «justice cannot be an intellectual or legal matter; it must be rooted within us, as urgent and impossible to ignore as hunger and thirst.» What Leo XIV embodied by visiting Las Raíces was precisely this embodied imperative.
The Augustinian legacy and the philoxenia Christian
Leo XIV, born Robert Francis Prevost, came from the Order of Saint Augustine, imbued with a spirituality that never separated contemplation from action, prayer from Caritas concrete. This is not a trivial biographical detail: the Catholic Church has, since its origins, cultivated what the Greeks called the philoxenia — love and hospitality towards the stranger. From the beginning of the 19th century, it was already structuring networks to support migrants. Monsignor Giovanni Battista Scalabrini was one of the first to propose to the Holy See the creation of a dicastery specifically dedicated to the pastoral care of migrants, convinced that this mission was at the very heart of the’«"evangelizing new lands"».
It is this entire tradition—long, stubborn, rooted in the conviction that the face of the migrant is the face of Christ—that Leo XIV mobilizes upon disembarking from the plane in the Canary Islands. And the journey to Tenerife then takes on a new dimension: it is not only the Pope who is traveling, but the entire Church that is visiting its own flesh scattered across the world's oceans. The motto of the apostolic journey to Spain—"Lift up your eyes" (Levad los ojos) — takes on its full meaning here. To raise one's eyes is to look at those whom society looks down on.
Mass at the port: the liturgy as a political act
At 1:15 p.m., Leo XIV presided over Mass at the port of Santa Cruz de Tenerife before returning to Rome. This choice of port was not liturgically neutral. In biblical and ecclesiastical tradition, the port is the place of departures and returns, the threshold between the known and the unknown, between safety and death. It was from these quays that the apostles set sail. It was from these quays that, in the 16th century, Augustinian missionaries departed for Latin America. And it is from these same quays that, every week, makeshift boats leave the African coast carrying men who entrust their lives to a patched-up Zodiac and the mercy of the currents.
By celebrating the Eucharist in this setting, Leo XIV accomplished something that liturgical theology calls anamnesis — to remember — but in the strongest sense: to make present. To make present the dead of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic in the Eucharistic sacrifice. To offer them to God. To demand justice. The Mass is no longer merely an act of worship: it becomes an act of spiritual resistance against oblivion.
The authority of bodies: when the Pope sets the example
The motto "Look up" and the dynamics of conversion
The Spanish Episcopal Conference, through its president, Bishop Luis Argüello, had issued an appeal echoing the motto of the journey: "Open your ears and your heart." This formulation says something essential about papal pedagogy: it is not simply a matter of informing the faithful, but of... convert — in the etymological sense of the term, convert, To turn together towards. To raise our eyes is to accept seeing what we had become accustomed to no longer seeing. It is an asceticism of the gaze.
The Epistle to the Hebrews formulates this requirement with a precision that cuts short any abstract speculation: «"Do not forget hospitality, for by practicing it some have entertained angels without knowing it."» (Hebrews 13:2). The author of the letter does not say, «Be generally kind.» He says: In that stranger who knocks at your door, in that haggard man who steps off a boat at Arguineguín or waits in a barracks at Las Raíces, perhaps there is hidden a messenger of God. The theology of hospitality is not a theology of condescending tolerance: it is a theology of sacred risk, of the potentially life-changing encounter with that which transcends our categories.
The limits of nuance and prophetic clarity
Leo XIV himself declared, in the early months of his pontificate, that every country has the right to choose who enters its territory, and that it is necessary to reconcile security and humanity. This nuanced position may have confused some, who expected a more unequivocal tone. But it actually reveals a theological and political maturity: the Church does not govern, it evangelization. It does not dictate a specific migration policy; it sets out incompressible ethical requirements — human dignity, the right to life, the prohibition of any dehumanization — and leaves it to the States to implement them with discernment.
What matters in Las Raíces is not the speech. It's the presence. Saint John Paul II liked to recall this fundamental conviction of magisterium of bodies that the Pope travel in person, that his feet tread the earth of the forgotten, that his hands clasp those of someone who nearly died at sea—this is a statement that no political commentary can distort. This is why, in the Book of Acts, Peter and John do not simply send funds to the lame man at the Beautiful Gate: «"Look at us"», Peter said, and he extended his hand to him (Acts 3:4). This contact, this obligation of eye contact, is the very nature of the Christian mission.
A Church in Motion
The detailed program of this apostolic journey is, in this respect, remarkably coherent. Leo XIV visited a homeless shelter in Madrid, a prison in Barcelona, and migrant centers in the Canary Islands. Everywhere, the same logic: to go to the existential peripheries, to use the vocabulary favored by his predecessor. But he adds something specific to his style: a pastoral systematization which transforms gestures into a program. As if the Church were saying: we do not only sympathize, we let's accompany. We are not managing a crisis, we are building a Church that resembles the People of God as they truly are — scattered, wounded, plural, and infinitely worthy.
Father Mussie Zerai, who himself founded the Habeshia association in 2006 to support refugees after years of receiving distress calls from the Libyan coast, embodies this dimension of the Church as living network of compassion. The fact that his view of the papal visit is so clear-sighted — neither naive nor cynical — says something important about the credibility that this papal gesture has in the eyes of those who have been working in these camps for years.
Perhaps this is ultimately the most eloquent sign of June 12th in the Canary Islands: that those closest to the suffering of migrants, those living in the margins of institutional neglect, recognize in the Pope's visit not a public relations exercise, but something akin to fidelity. Fidelity to the Gospel. Fidelity to humanity. And, for a Christian, these are one and the same fidelity.
✝ Biblical references
3 passages · 3 books
You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you… you will be my witnesses. (Acts 1:8)
The birth and expansion of the Church from Jerusalem to Rome under the action of the Spirit.
→ Explore the Codex Acts of the Apostles
I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt. (Exodus 20:2)
The liberation of Israel from Egyptian slavery and the giving of the Law at Sinai.
→ Explore the Exodus Codex
Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. (Hebrews 13:8)
Jesus, high priest of the new covenant: Christ's superiority over Moses and the Temple.
→ Explore the Hebrew Codex
🌍 8 countries involved
In Afghanistan, Catholics today represent a tiny, clandestine minority in one of the most dangerous countries in the world for Christians. The Christian presence there has been virtually nonexistent for centuries, the Christian…
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In Eritrea, Catholics represent approximately 5.1% of the population in a country marked by one of the worst violations of religious freedom in the world. Catholic evangelization began in the 19th century with the Lazarists and…
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Still largely marked by its Catholic heritage, Spain today has a majority of baptized people, even though religious practice is declining sharply. According to an ancient tradition, Christianity arrived there as early as the 1st century…
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In The Gambia, Catholics represent approximately 3% of the population, forming a small minority in a country with a very large Muslim majority. Evangelization developed from the 19th century onwards thanks to Catholic missions…
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In Libya, the Catholic presence is now reduced to a few thousand people, mainly foreign migrant workers, in a country that is almost entirely Muslim. The region's long Christian history…
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In Mali, Catholics represent approximately 3% of the population in a country with a very large Muslim majority, facing a serious security crisis. Catholic evangelization began at the end of the 19th century with the Fathers…
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In Pakistan, Catholics represent approximately 1.3% of the population in one of the most dangerous countries for Christians in the world. Catholic evangelization developed from the 16th century onwards with missionaries…
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In Senegal, Catholics represent approximately 4% of the population, a modest minority but one deeply rooted in the national life of a country with a very large Muslim majority. Evangelization began in the 15th century with…
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