The series of videos disseminated by the Archdiocese of Madrid on the occasion of the upcoming visit of the Pope, in the format of the podcast Una Iglesia mil voces, reveals a problem that goes beyond the anecdotal.
What is being projected is not only youthful enthusiasm or spontaneous testimony, but a worrying doctrinal confusion in an official channel that should guarantee exactly the opposite.
Among the pieces disseminated by the official channel of the diocese of Spain’s capital, expressions accumulate that overflow legitimate emotion to enter directly into the realm of error.
From more or less questionable excesses like “I’m going to breathe the same air as the Pope,” to serious errors like “I saw the Pope and I saw God,” or a video disseminated in all formats in which a girl states that “we don’t have Jesus here until he comes back down, but we have the Pope who… well, that’s Him.”
These are not mere hyperboles.
They are formulations that deny the current presence of Christ and, simultaneously, attribute to the Pontiff an identity that the Church has never recognized for him.
Catholic doctrine is unequivocal on this point. Jesus Christ is not absent “until he returns”; his presence is real, though not visible, eminently in the Eucharist and in the life of the Church.
And, obviously, the Pope is not Christ, nor his ontological substitute, nor an incarnate prolongation of his person.
He is the successor of Saint Peter and vicar of Christ, that is, his representative with delegated authority, not his identity.
The problem does not lie in a faithful person, and even less a minor, expressing themselves imprecisely in a moment of enthusiasm. That is understandable.
The problem is that those expressions have been selected, edited, and disseminated from an institutional channel without any type of correction or contextualization.
There, the responsibility is unequivocal.
An official medium of a Catholic archdiocese cannot limit itself to amplifying emotions; it must exercise a basic formative function.
Ecclesial communication is not neutral. Even in light or testimonial formats, every piece published transmits a certain understanding of the faith.
If from an official channel the identification between the Pope and God is normalized, or it is suggested that Christ is absent until his final return while he is embodied in the Pope, the result is an implicit defective catechesis.
The use of minors also introduces an element of special sensitivity.
Using children or adolescents to verbalize theological content without minimal guidance or editorial review is not only risky, it is imprudent.
The error is not in the girl who speaks, but in the adult who decides that those words are suitable to be disseminated as a representative message.
The visit of a Pope is a pastoral moment of the first order. Precisely for this reason, it demands a higher standard, not a lower one.
Between communicative closeness and doctrinal precision, there is no necessary contradiction; what there is, in this case, is an absence of control that ends up degrading the content.