The itinerary, June 6 -- He arrived by commercial flight, no ceremony that Spain's protocol handlers hadn't rehearsed for months. But the moment Pope Leo XIV disembarked at Adolfo Suarez Madrid-Barajas International Airport on Saturday morning, ending a 15-year papal absence from Spanish soil, the political stakes attached to his seven-day visit became impossible to paper over.

Madrid, Barcelona, Gran Canaria, Tenerife - reads like a carefully composed argument rather than a pastoral schedule. Each stop carries its own unstated brief. In Madrid, the first pope to address Las Cortes Generales will speak June 8 to a parliament where the far-right Vox party has made anti-immigration rhetoric its loudest rallying point. In Barcelona, he will...