Noting Pope Leo’s Key Overtures to Spain and Monaco

National Catholic Register, 9 April 2026

Both events indicate what has become a key theme of the new pontificate: easing frictions and tensions.

The drama of Holy Week includes the kings and their viceroys, Herod and Pilate, and a dispute over kingship itself. Jesus goes to the cross under the title “King of the Jews.”

Kings of an earthly sort were prominent on Pope Leo XIV’s schedule just before Holy Week, with the king and queen of Spain visiting the Holy Father and Pope Leo choosing Monaco — a tiny principality still ruled by a monarch with genuine authority — for his second papal trip outside Italy.

Both events indicate what has become a key theme of the new pontificate: easing frictions and tensions. Leo intends to reengage the papacy with some of the European nations less engaged by Pope Francis.

In choosing where to travel, the late Holy Father famously preferred the “peripheries.” That was applied to Europe too, where Francis visited the Nordic countries, the Baltic countries, Albania and Greece, but the nations in the historic center of European power — Britain, France, Germany and Spain — were left out. There was a preference, too, for Protestant and Orthodox Europe over Catholic Europe.

There were trips to historic Catholic countries in Europe, but those were more or less obligatory: the canonization of Francisco and Jacinta on the centennial of the apparitions in Fatima (2017), the World Meeting of Families in Dublin (2018), World Youth Day in Kraków (2016) and Lisbon (2023). 

Indeed, Pope Francis went out of his way, in the case of France, to insist that he was not visiting. He went to Strasbourg (2014) to address the European Parliament, stayed only four hours, and declined to visit the local cathedral, then celebrating its 1,000th anniversary. It was a visit to the seat of the parliament, not to France. It was as if the Pope had visited the U.N. in New York and not gone to St. Patrick’s. 

In 2023, Francis went to Marseille, France’s second-largest city, but he went for a conference on Mediterranean immigration. He was blunt: “I’ll go to Marseille, but not to France.”

Then in 2024, when invited to Paris for the reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral, Pope Francis declined, ceding the role of guest of honor to President Donald Trump. Just days later, though, he visited the Mediterranean island of Corsica, a French territory — causing some offense in France that he would visit neither Notre Dame nor Paris.

Nor did he visit Madrid, or Munich or London. 

Pope Leo XIV is taking a different approach. 

He welcomed King Charles III and Queen Camilla on a “state visit” last October, a special honor. As the (pre-Reformation) English crown had a particular link with the papal basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls, the king was named a “Royal Confrater” of the basilica, and a designated throne was provided for him and his successors. It can be expected that, in due course, Pope Leo will return the visit.

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