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.

Forty-two percent of those baptized were ages 18 to 25, and adult baptisms have tripled compared to 10 years ago. Last summer at the Vatican, Pope Leo XIV spoke to a gathering of baptism candidates and newly baptized from France. “What a joy to see young people who are engaging with faith and want to give a sense to their life, by letting themselves be guided by Christ and his Gospel,” he said.

Mónica Cornejo Valle, a religion professor at Complutense University in Madrid, said the profile of Catholic youth appears more committed than before, though the overall number has not grown substantially. María Salazar, 23, leads a Barcelona outpost of the global Catholic youth movement Effetá.

She said many peers seek “a feeling of peace” and noted a recent “boom of youth” at her parish, the Sagrada Familia.

About 120 young people there participate in adoration and weekend spiritual retreats, and they volunteer with elderly parishioners and tourists. ” Youth leaders say current interest stems in part from disenchantment with other institutions and from a church emphasis on social justice that began under Pope Francis.