Photo credit: UCA News
Standing at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, where thousands of migrants arrive each year after dangerous journeys from Africa, Pope Leo XIV recalled the biblical sea monsters Leviathan and Rahab.
UCA News reports that according to him, the greatest threats lurking in these waters are not creatures of Scripture.
“Monsters lurk in these seas: mafias that profit from despair, traffickers who enslave women and children, and those whose indiference allows the poor to be swallowed up by exploitation or forgetfulness,” he said on June 11 in the Canary Islands.
In his first stop of the final leg of his apostolic journey to Spain, Pope Leo delivered an impassioned speech on migration. Those “monsters” are real, as more than 3,000 people died or disappeared while trying to reach the Canary Islands in 2025, according to the Spanish NGO Caminando Fronteras. More than 10,000 people were recorded to have drowned along this dangerous migration route in 2024, it added.
Pope Leo appealed to the nations of origin of the migrants, saying they must establish conditions for peace, justice and development, and he appealed to transit nations to protect people from criminal networks.
Becoming the first pope in history to visit this autonomous community of Spain, Pope Leo was also fulfilling his predecessor’s desire to visit the migrants arriving in these shpres and the people who rescue them and assist them.
According to the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, Ousseynou Fall and other migrants who have made a new life on Gran Canaria had written to Pope Francis in 2024, inviting him to the volcanic archipelago off the coast of Morocco that had welcomed them.
It would have been the Argentine Pope’s fourth visit to a migrant entry point into Europe after Lampedusa in 2013, Lesbos in 2016 and 2021 to draw attention to the consequences of unscrupulous traffickers taking advantage of people searching for a better future and the international community’s lack of cooperation and initiative in regulating immigration and safeguarding its seas. Pope Leo will go to Lampedusa July 4.
The US pope, who is a grandson and great-grandson of immigrants, accepted \fall’s invitation, the newspaper said June 5, making it beee the last leg after visiting Madrid June 6-9 and Barcelona June 9-11.
With two young men from Africa by his side, the pope tossed a floral bouquet in the blue water to honour and pray for the dead.
The pope also prayed before a statue of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, patroness of sailors, and he blessed a wooden cross fashioned from the wreckage of boats capsized and destroyed on their voyage.
The visit comes as Spain recently launched a mass regularization program aimed at legalizing the status of some 500,000 undocumented migrants. Meanwhille, many european Union member states have been enacting increasingly restrictive and punitive asylum rules, according to Amnesty International’s European Institutions Office; and holding centres can be slow to process and unable to properly care for massive influxes of migrants.
