Image by Frida Lannerström.
On the Left’s curious infatuation with a man who thinks their cousin Lisa is going straight to hell
“God made tigers carnivorous,” Pi Patel observes from the cramped and terrified corner of a life raft somewhere in the Pacific, “so I must learn to catch fish.” He is a strict ethical vegetarian. He is also, more pressingly, sharing a twenty-six-foot boat with a four-hundred-pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. And Pi, being a sensible boy despite his many gods, has grasped something that appears to elude a considerable portion of the left and precisely the Spanish left: you do not change the nature of a thing by wishing very hard that it were different. Think hopes and prayers.
Pope Leo XIV came to Spain. Five hundred thousand plus people, many of them young, turned out in Madrid’s Plaza de Lima, cheering “This is the youth of the pope” during what could only be described as a rock star’s welcome. The faithful swooned. Entirely normal. The Vatican’s absolute monarchs have always had that effect on the faithful. That, after all, is what the word means.
But the faithful are not what is interesting here. What is interesting, what is, in fact, completely and spectacularly unhinged, is the warm reception from the Spanish left. The progressives. The secularists. The Sánchez coalition. The people who have spent the better part of the last decade correctly observing that the Catholic Church is an institution with all the moral authority of a man selling indulgences outside a confessional. Not to mention the kiddie porn.
That is not a throwaway line. Spain’s national ombudsman estimates some 200,000 minors have suffered abuse by Catholic clergy since 1940, a figure large enough to require the kind of extrapolation usually reserved for famines. During this very visit, Leo made veiled references to it, calling it a “scourge,” an “open wound,” and spoke movingly of “truth, justice, reparation.” Then he met, in private, with six survivors, cherry picked by the Vatican, no press, no photographs, while other survivor groups stood outside insisting they too had “a voice.” Sixty years to arrange a focus group. Thoughts and prayers once again.
Compare the speed. A woman who attempts to celebrate Mass incurs automatic excommunication, instantaneous, no trial, no decade of careful study, built into the act like a trapdoor. The same bureaucracy that can locate a dissenting nun before she’s finished the consecration somehow required seventy years, multiple investigations, and the looming embarrassment of a papal visit to produce one hour-long meeting. This is not incompetence. Incompetence is random. This is priority, expressed in the only language an institution actually speaks. And it is worth remembering that this is a Church built on the principle that silence is itself the sin, that the unconfessed thought is graver than the confessed one. It demands of frightened children, alone in the dark, a confession of feelings. Of itself, for generations, it demands nothing. The Magisterium reserves its swiftest justice for sins it did not commit, and its slowest, most pastorally patient processes for the ones it did.
So why the swoon? Because Leo traveled to the Canary Islands, Europe’s Florida Keys, and also one of the world’s deadliest migration routes, to stand at the edge of the sea where the bodies, if the current is just right, wash up and bear witness. Because he has maintained an emphasis on the dignity of migrants at a time of severe anti-immigrant backlash across Europe and the rest of the western world. Because he urged Spaniards to stop “fanning the flames of polarization,” which is, admittedly, a fairly reasonable thing to say to a country in a decidedly Weimar moment, where the far right now governs in coalition in many of its regions and where it could even enter into the national government after next year’s general elections.
The left heard all this and thought: our guy.
And on migration, God help us, he rather is. Almost two thousand known people died attempting to reach the Canary Islands from the shores of West Africa in 2025 alone. Some ended up as paper skeletons who wash ashore as far away as Brazil, the rest are invisible shipwrecks. The Pope went there. He stood on the dock. He looked at the boats. This matters enormously, and to understand why, you need to understand the particular strain of political Catholicism it exposes.
Spain’s far right, like its counterparts across Europe and the Atlantic, has spent years constructing an elaborate theological alibi. The Church, in their telling, is not primarily a set of moral obligations toward the poor, the stranger, and the dispossessed — it is a civilization. A fortress. A wall, if you will, both literal and spiritual, between their idealized Christian West and the barbarian tide lapping at its shores. Vox, Spain’s hard-right party, waves the cross at rallies with the same unselfconscious enthusiasm with which they advocate for policies that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the Third Reich. The faith, in this reading, is not a call to wash the feet of the man drowning off Tenerife, it is the reason you are justified in letting him drown, since he is, after all, coming from the wrong side of the civilizational divide.
This is, theologically speaking, a position of some audacity. But the Spanish right is not alone in its cheek. One thinks of JD Vance —convert, Catholic, Vice President of the United States, accomplished lickspittle — who earlier this year found himself in the remarkable position of lecturing Pope Francis on Christian doctrine. Vance, who discovered Catholicism with the fervor characteristic of those for whom religion arrives via DoorDash as a fully-formed aesthetic and cultural identity rather than a slow, inconvenient moral reckoning, invoked the Roman concept of ordo amoris, the “order of love”, to argue that Christian charity begins at home, extends to neighbors, then to countrymen, and only eventually, if there’s any gas left in the tank, to the foreigner at the gate. The Argentinian Pope responded, with rather more patience than the argument deserved, that this was not quite how it worked. The Vance position is, to be fair, internally coherent. It is also, for anyone who has read the Parable of the Good Samaritan without falling asleep at the crucial moment, almost comically wrong. The entire point of that parable being that the man in the ditch is helped by the person from the wrong civilization, while the theologically respectable walk past on the other side.
This is what Leo’s presence on that dock exposes. Not merely the hypocrisy of politicians on the far and conventional right, that requires no exposure, it being their natural condition, but the specific, preening, self-congratulatory hypocrisy of those who have wrapped themselves in the Church’s symbols while cheerfully disregarding the gospel’s most unambiguous instructions. The ones who insist on the absolute inviolability of Christian values while maintaining a warm personal relationship with the sacrament of divorce, treating Sunday Mass as something that happens to other people, and explaining, with a straight face, that their Savior’s most famous commandments about wealth, poverty, and the treatment of strangers were, on reflection, more of a suggestion than anything else.
That Leo’s clarity on migration makes these people squirm is real, it is satisfying, and it is — here is the problem — precisely what causes the left to mistake the tiger for a house cat.
The left applauds the conclusion because it resembles their own. What they prefer not to examine is the source. Leo does not defend migrants despite being Catholic. He defends them because he is Catholic. Because while the secular left was busy celebrating the Pope’s magnificently photogenic stand against drowning human beings, they apparently nodded off for the other parts of the program. You know the ones. The part about marriage equality. The part about women in the priesthood, still a firm, unambiguous no, thank you, sit down, mind your place, remain silent, be in submission. The part where a woman in a violent marriage is counseled by Holy Mother Church to remain, to pray, to endure, because the sacrament of matrimony is indissoluble. Thoughts and prayers again. The part where a curious thirteen-year-old learns from an enthusiastic catechist that the warm feelings they have started noticing, the ones that arrive unbidden in the dark, are an occasion of mortal sin, that if they die with those feelings unconfessed and unrepented, they face not a stern talking-to but an eternity of something considerably worse. The part where cousin Lisa, whose spouse happens to be Susan, is informed with great pastoral gentleness that her love is, in the eyes of the eternal, disordered, and that eternity, for the unrepentant, runs quite long and involves burning sulfur baths.
These are not fringe positions. These are not policy nuances buried in a footnote of the Catechism. These are doctrine. They are, to use the technical term, non-negotiable.
And here we arrive at something the modernizers never quite want to examine directly. Because the problem is not this Pope, or the last one, or the one before that. The problem is the books, the foundation stones.
In the Christian case, let us be precise about what we are actually dealing with. This is a cobbled-together, committee-selected, translation-of-a-translation-of-a-translation of texts written decades or centuries after the events they describe, by authors who not only disagreed with each other, but are even contradictory on fundamental points, assembled into a canon by councils of men with considerable political interests in the outcome, and then handed down to subsequent generations as the unimpeachable word of God. The Old Testament features a deity who, in between the passages about loving your neighbor, finds the time to endorse slavery, mandate genocide, and prescribe capital punishment for such crimes as gathering sticks on the wrong day of the week. The New Testament softens the tone considerably, God having apparently undergone something of a rebrand between the two volumes, but provides the theological scaffolding for two millennia of very confident opinions about who burns and who doesn’t. That this ramshackle archive of contradictions is the foundation on which the Church bases its claim to eternal, unalterable truth is, if you stop and look at it directly, an act of institutional audacity on a breathtaking scale.
What every revealed religion shares, in the end, is this: the claim that the conversation is over. That the final word has been spoken. That a being of infinite power and perfect knowledge has communicated his will on the matters that concern us, and that will is not subject to appeal, revision, or the slow accumulation of human moral experience. The tiger’s diet was decided before you were born, either by a committee in Nicaea or by the archangel Gabriel over the Arabian desert. Either way, it was not decided by you, it will not be revisited by you, and no amount of hopes and prayers that the tiger might develop a taste for something more accommodating will change the fact of what it is.
When God, any God, in any of his published editions, sets out with admirable clarity his position on sexuality, on the role of women, on the prescribed punishment for apostasy, adultery or shellfish, he is not floating a position paper for discussion at the next synod. He is issuing instructions. Instructions that his faithful, if they are being consistent rather than merely convenient, are obliged to follow.
And this is where the otherwise intelligent progressive instinct derails entirely into wishful thinking. “If only he would modernize a bit more,” goes the familiar refrain, the fond hope that someday soon a Pope will look at two thousand years of accumulated theology and say: you know what, perhaps we had the wrong end of the stick on several key points. The reformers mean well. They always do. They imagine the Church is like a political party, a coalition of interests that can be nudged leftward by the right leader at the right moment.
But the Church is not the Labour or Democratic Party. It is not a platform to be updated. It is an institution that grounds its entire legitimacy, its raison d’etre, in the claim that it is transmitting the word of God, unchanged and unchangeable, across the centuries. You cannot ask it to revise that word without asking it to confess that it was never the word of God in the first place, which is rather the whole ballgame.
And then there is the matter of Benito.
Asked on his flight from Rome how he expected Spain’s young people to respond to his visit, Leo acknowledged he would be competing for their attention with one of the world’s biggest pop stars, whose string of concerts in Madrid overlapped with the papal schedule. “If they were confronted with the question, do you want to go to Bad Bunny or see the Pope, I think many will go to see Bad Bunny,” he conceded. In the end, the competition proved less stiff than anticipated , half a million turned up for the vigil, but the symmetry was too good to ignore, and so the two men met privately in Real Madrid’s temple at the Bernabéu, no photographs, no press, just a brief and reportedly friendly exchange between the most-streamed artist on the planet and the leader of 1.4 billion Catholics. “Trap meets transcendence,” as one headline had it, which is the kind of thing that gets written when two enormous cultural forces occupy the same city at the same moment and the internet needs a sentence.
But the parallel that nobody seemed particularly interested in drawing is instructive. Because Bad Bunny — Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, a boy from Vega Baja, Puerto Rico, who became the most-streamed artist in the world four years running — has his own complicated relationship with the feminist left. His earlier catalog sits squarely in the reggaeton tradition, a genre that has been, to put it gently, not always a beacon of progressive gender politics. Scholars have written earnestly about his “purplewashing”, deploying feminist imagery as aesthetic while the underlying material tells a rather different story. The criticism is legitimate. Some of the lyrics are what they are.
And yet. Bad Bunny has, visibly, over the course of a decade in public life, evolved. Yes, I use the word on purpose. He has called out machismo and sexism from award stages. He has written songs about violence against women with genuine critical weight. He has collaborated with and elevated female artists in a genre that historically treated them as furniture. Whether you find the transformation complete or convincing is, reasonably, a matter of debate, but the evolution is real, and more to the point, it is possible. Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio is a human being. He has a mind that receives new information, a conscience that can be moved, a public persona that has shifted in response to criticism, to growth, to time. He can be wrong, and then less wrong. He can be held to account, and respond to that accounting. He can update.
This is the categorical difference that the modernizing left perpetually refuses to confront when it turns its hopeful gaze on the Church. A man can change his mind. A pop star can evolve. An artist who once objectified women in his lyrics can stand on a stage and denounce the culture that produced those words, and mean it, and be believed, at least provisionally, because humans are capable of moral revision. They are fallible and therefore improvable.
But when you have staked your entire institutional existence on the claim that your positions are not yours — that they were handed down from a being of infinite wisdom and power who does not make errors and does not revise, that they are not policies subject to review but eternal truths etched in the fabric of creation — you have removed yourself, by design, from the ordinary human machinery of learning and change. You are not wrong and then less wrong. You are right, because God is right, and God does not issue corrections. He does not post a thread walking back his earlier statements. He does not, as they say, have second thoughts (well except the appendix).
The only mechanism the Church has ever had for genuine doctrinal revision is the burning bush model: a sufficiently dramatic divine intervention that supersedes the previous instruction. It has happened, technically. God told the early Christians to stop with the circumcision and the dietary laws, which was received with considerable relief. He periodically inspired councils to update the furniture arrangement. But on the matters that actually concern the living people in the pews — on the bodies of women, on the loves of gay people, on the children lying awake in the dark afraid of hell — the celestial dictator has, as far as anyone can tell, been maintaining radio silence for quite some time now. His deputies on earth interpret this silence, with remarkable consistency, as endorsement of the current position.
One final note on the menagerie. The tiger is in the boat. The bunny was also, briefly, in the same city, and to his credit, paid his respects. He is a good bunny, or is at least trying to become one, which is the most any of us can do. But it would be naive, aboard that particular vessel, to imagine that the tiger’s appreciation of the bunny’s recent artistic evolution and developing feminist consciousness would survive contact with his appetite. The tiger does not award points for personal growth. He is not that kind of tiger.
Asking Pope Leo to endorse gay marriage is not like asking him to reconsider his position on the capital gains tax. It is asking him to announce that the last two millennia of his institution’s foundational teaching were, at best, a well-intentioned misunderstanding. A tiger that decides it prefers radishes is not a tiger who has grown and evolved. It is, at minimum, a very sick tiger.
In the Life of Pi, Patel kept Richard Parker fed. He caught the fish. He stared clearly at the nature of the animal sharing his boat and acted accordingly. He survived.
The Spanish left, by contrast, has decided that if they feed the tiger enough headlines about the Canary Islands, they can afford to ignore the rest of his diet. They have dressed him in sheep’s clothing, or rather, in their imagination, dressed themselves in it, and are celebrating that he too grieves for those drowning in the world’s oceans.
And he does grieve. That is real. But the grieving for migrants and the condemnation of Susan and Lisa’s marriage are not separable positions in some ideological buffet where you fill your tray with the good stuff and leave the rest. They flow from the same source. They are issued by the same authority. They are, if you believe the Church’s account of itself, equally the word of God. The warm-and-fuzzy Pope and the angry sky God who endorses genocide and capital punishment for gathering sticks on the Sabbath are not two different beings. They are the same package deal, available at your local parish, complete with the full doctrinal back catalogue.
The tiger is in the boat. He is beautiful. He is, in his way, magnificent. He has made some genuinely moving statements about people drowning in the sea. He addressed the Spanish Parliament, the first Pope in history to address both chambers in a joint session, and said things that made progressives feel, for a brief shining moment, that history was on their side. They applauded for seven minutes. Yes, seven minutes.
And then he went back to being a tiger.
Which he was the whole time. Which he will be tomorrow. Which, if you had been paying attention, he told you he was, very clearly, in writing, available in most languages, at any church you care to wander into or most hotel room desk drawers.
Pi made it to shore. The tiger walked into the jungle without looking back.
Bad Bunny can grow up.
The Magisterium cannot.
That is not a flaw in the implementation. It is the entire point.
