The shame of criticizing Leo XIV and not a criminal like Vladimir Putin

The Catholic Church is an institution that periodically endures all kinds of political campaigns, for various reasons.

Leo XIV's criticism of abortion and euthanasia in his speech to the Spanish Parliament
Has the visit of Leo XIV to Spain led to the conversion of a socialist councilwoman?

The doctrine of the Church is an inexhaustible source of disagreement with certain ideological sectors. Obviously, it is entirely legitimate to disagree with any religious institution, both regarding its doctrine and its specific decisions. Even Catholics themselves can have differing opinions on certain ecclesial matters, without this conflicting with the respect due to the Church, since it is not a totalitarian regime.

There are disagreements that fall into a very different category: that of attack and defamation. The political and media left has a long tradition of hate campaigns against the Church, and the more extreme the left, the more fanatically anti-Catholic it is. Leo XIV's visit to Spain has once again highlighted a well-known fact: the left's inability to treat Catholics with respect, the same left that treats Islam with devotion and labels any criticism of the religion of Muhammad as "Islamophobia."

This Monday we saw an example of that attitude. Ione Belarra, leader of the communist party Podemos, criticized Leo XIV's speech in Congress, comparing him to an Iranian ayatollah. "I ask people to think about what would happen if, instead of the Pope, it were an ayatollah who came to speak in Congress. It's very obvious what everyone would think,", Belarra stated. What is logical to think is that if an Iranian ayatollah had spoken in Congress, he would possibly have heard the applause of Podemos, a party that five months ago refused to support a text criticizing the brutal repression of the Iranian dictatorship, with thousands of people massacred for demanding freedom.

We are also talking about a party traditionally aligned with the interests of the Kremlin. We don't have to go back very far to find an example of this attitude. On April 30, in the vote on a European Parliament resolution supporting Ukraine, Podemos was the only Spanish party that voted against it. A vote that is not surprising if we observe the support of that far-left party for totalitarian regimes that are allies of Russia: Last year Podemos traveled to Cuba and to China to support those communist dictatorships. The second of those trips included the participation of Belarra, who has dedicated to criticizing Leo XIV the time he did not dedicate to denouncing human rights violations in the Xi Jinping dictatorship or the attacks against Ukraine by the Putin dictatorship.

Finding this double standard on the far-left is already commonplace. We are, after all, talking about an environment of fanatics who support the worst dictatorships while demonizing democratic countries like the United States and Israel. What is new is finding similar attitudes on a segment of the right. I am no longer referring to that extreme right where you can often find sedevacantists or neopagans who, for obvious reasons, do not look favorably upon the Pope, but to people who in many cases are Catholic but who have differences with the Church on various issues.

I repeat: disagreeing with the Church or the Pope is legitimate. What is regrettable is reading and listening to certain commentators who have so far already directed harsh criticism at Leo XIV but not at a criminal like Putin, who has been massacring the Ukrainian people for four years without them finding a single minute to publish any criticism of it (in some cases they have found time to criticize NATO or the EU for supporting Ukraine). A silence that also hangs over the frequent Russian attacks on Christian churches.

I suppose that much of this criticism stems from the Church's position on immigration, a position with which I disagreed here a few months ago, but which in no way justifies the harsh attacks the Pope is receiving from certain sectors, as if some saw this religious institution as troublesome competition that needs to be eliminated. In some of these sectors, it's now much easier to find criticism of the Church than of Russia, a dictatorship allied with some of the regimes that most persecute Christians in the world. Frankly, this doesn't seem normal to me.

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Photo: Vatican Media.