When Spain’s top bishops met with Pope Leo XIV in November, they expressed concerns about young Spaniards whose hunger for spirituality had drawn them to private Catholic groups instead of the church.
The pope, several of the bishops said, urged them to do more to welcome those young people into the church, and soon after offered to help by visiting Spain.
Leo fulfilled that promise this week, making a seven-day journey through Spain that ended on Friday in the Canary Islands, drawing enormous crowds, including many young Catholics.
That enthusiasm has led to optimism that Leo might succeed at the goal he set for the bishops in November. He could, his supporters say, bring into the fold young people who might otherwise turn to secularism as well as the musical and charismatic Catholic groups that compete with the traditional church for attention.
Leo’s predecessor, Francis, also generated enthusiasm, early in his tenure, about getting people back in pews. But as his papacy continued, Francis generally avoided Europe’s classic Catholic strongholds, like Spain, focusing instead on social justice issues like migration and on encouraging imperiled churches in far-off lands.
Leo is not abandoning Francis’s footsteps, visiting Africa in April and meeting migrants on Friday in the Canary Islands, where he warned human traffickers to “stop, repent” lest they face God’s wrath for exploiting refugees. But Leo’s trip to mainland Spain, church leaders here said, signaled that the American pope is perhaps more willing than Francis to focus simultaneously on the Old Continent and bring its young believers fully aboard.
“This was one of the main goals of inviting him to come to Spain as soon as possible,” said Yago de la Cierva, a crisis management specialist who was the official coordinator of the papal visit. He said the church in Spain expected Leo “would be like a magnet for young people who are looking for answers to their main questions. This is exactly what happened.”
While it was too soon to tell whether the fervor would last, Mr. de la Cierva said, “This is a new beginning.”
The church, though, has tried this in Spain and Europe before. It didn’t go well.
In 2011, when more than 70 percent of Spaniards still considered themselves Catholic, Pope Benedict XVI traveled to Madrid to rally young Catholics whose government had in recent years legalized gay marriage and expanded abortion rights.
Benedict was elected precisely to reverse the tide of secularization in Europe. Instead, the Spanish church hemorrhaged believers, with the percentage of self-identifying Catholics in Spain plummeting to less than 55 percent, according to the Spanish Sociological Research Center.
“This great transformation is not proving easy for us,” Archbishop Luis Argüello, the president of the Spanish Episcopal Conference, said of the changes in Spanish society.
Alauda Ruiz de Azúa, a director whose film “The Sundays” won Spain’s top cinema prize this year for its depiction of a teenager’s decision to become a nun, said that in researching the film, she constantly heard complaints about a drop off in first communions and other metrics of church attendance. “My perception making the film,” she said, “was that society was increasingly secular.”
Pope Leo’s visit this week has given Catholics some small signs of hope. On Saturday in Madrid, an estimated 500,000 people prayed with Leo at an outdoor vigil for Spain’s youth. Leo, apparently impressed by the turnout, said that the Madrid church had scored a “spectacular goal.”
That enthusiasm follows other glimmers of a Catholic revival, church leaders said.
Cardinal José Cobo of Madrid spoke in an interview about a slight rise in the number of men entering the priesthood in the capital. Joan Planellas, the archbishop of Tarragona, spoke of an increase in adult baptisms. They and others said they weren’t sure of what was spurring those revivals, but talked about a hunger for meaning in a culture where people are disenchanted with institutions or increasingly alone online.
Church analysts say, though, that those are the same forces driving an increasing number of young Spaniards to private Catholic movements centered around music and spiritual retreats.
But critics worry that such movements have a political overlay — often with conservative and populist parties, including the hard-right group Vox — from which the church has sought to free itself since its close association with the dictatorship of Francisco Franco and this century’s lost battles over culture war issues.
That politicization has worried Pope Leo, the bishops said at the November meeting. He was also concerned that the movements temporarily scratched a spiritual itch but failed to develop a mature faith or sustain the life of the church at the parish level.
It is too soon to assess whether Leo can prompt a change in course, but he has his work cut out for him.
Juan Lorenzo, 21, who attended a papal event on Sunday, said that though he had noticed “a lot of young people more interested” in Catholicism, many of them were drawn to private groups that “move people.”
But those people, he said, “are not so involved in the Catholic Church.”
