The campaign accompanying the preparation of the Pope’s trip to Spain has presented the official spot for the visit of Leo XIV to Spain.
Two and a half minutes of carefully crafted images, impeccable aesthetics, emotive music and a message centered on the gaze, the encounter, human differences and social coexistence.
All very correct.
All very sensitive.
All extraordinarily empty.
The result resembles more a philanthropic campaign for social awareness than an announcement for the visit of the successor of Peter.
How can an official spot for the Pope’s visit become a message so carefully stripped of Christian content?
Much emotion, little faith
The video shows a subway car full of different people who learn to “look at each other” and discover that they share fears, dreams and fatigue.
The final message invites to “raise the gaze”, “lower the barriers” and “find answers”.
But answers… to what?
The problem is not talking about human fraternity. Christianity has always spoken of it.
The problem is building a discourse where the supernatural dimension disappears completely and where the man seems to suffice himself through the simple emotional experience of encountering the other.
The result is a message perfectly compatible with any institutional campaign, international NGO, corporate advertisement or social cohesion initiative, even a soft-drink ad could fit.
The man as the man’s answer
Maybe the most revealing phrase of the video comes when the voice-over asks: “And if the person I have in front of me is the answer I need to understand myself?”.
There is condensed all the anthropological and spiritual problem of the announcement.
Because for Christianity, man is not the ultimate answer of man. Christ is.
The neighbor matters precisely because he points to God, because he has been created in the image of God and because the love to the other arises from the love to Christ.
When that supernatural foundation is eliminated, the fraternity ends up reduced to a horizontal sentimentalism so emotive as incapable of responding to the deep questions of the human soul.
An increasingly secularized ecclesial aesthetic
The video reflects additionally a trend increasingly frequent in contemporary ecclesial communication: the obsession to be inclusive, friendly and universally acceptable even at the cost of emptying the Christian message of its most specifically religious content.
Everything is designed to not bother anyone.
No sin because it could sound harsh. No truth because it could sound exclusive.
No call to conversion because it could seem demanding. No Christ because it could divide.
Only a generic spirituality of encounter, empathy and shared emotions remains.
Paradoxically, in the attempt to be accessible to all, the message ends up losing precisely what makes the Church unique.