Pope Leo XIV Schedules Visits to Spain in June 2026 and France in September 2026

Pope Leo XIV will travel to Spain in June 2026 and to France in September 2026. The visits will include events with young Catholics in countries where church attendance has declined sharply from earlier generations. On June 6, the first day of the Spain trip, the pope will hold a prayer vigil with youth in a large Madrid public square.

He will also visit a migrant center in the Canary Islands and a prison near Barcelona. On June 10 he will celebrate Mass at the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona and inaugurate the new tower of Jesus Christ. Sara Cabral, 26, who lives on Spain’s Canary Islands, joined a faith youth group three years ago after listening to a song that felt as if God were speaking to her.

She is preparing to attend the pope’s Mass in Gran Canaria with friends. “You get a restlessness about an emptiness that you don’t know how to fill,” Cabral said. ” Rev. Josetxo Vera, spokesperson for Spain’s Catholic Bishops Conference, said many teens scare their atheist parents by asking to be baptized after becoming attracted to Christian messages in popular culture such as Rosalía’s album Lux.

Spain was ruled by dictator Gen. Francisco Franco until 1975. A Pew Research Center survey conducted in 2024 found that 80 percent of Spanish adults were raised Catholic, while 47 percent currently identify as Catholic.

Two percent of Spanish adults joined the Catholic faith from non-Catholic upbringings, and 16 percent of Spanish Catholics attend Mass at least weekly. There are nearly 23,000 active Catholic parishes in Spain. Hakuna, a lay Catholic youth movement, started in the early 2010s in a Madrid parish and became an official organization of the Spanish church in 2017.

It has released seven records of Christian music and has approximately 35,000 youth members, said spokeswoman Maca Torres. More than 13,300 baptisms of people older than 7 were counted in the latest annual report from Spain’s Catholic bishops conference. In France, 13,000 adults were baptized at the Easter Vigil this year, according to the country’s Conference of Catholic Bishops.