Published On 7 Jun 20267 Jun 2026<\/p>\n
Pope Leo XIV has honoured Spain\u2019s centuries-old tradition of religious devotion as a \u201cschool of faith\u201d as he held Mass for a million people, and highlighted one of the most iconic expressions of Spanish popular piety with a procession over carpets of flower petals.<\/p>\n
The head of the Catholic Church arrived in Spain on Saturday and urged its people to put an end to polarisation and work for unity.<\/p>\n
For Sunday\u2019s Mass and procession in Madrid, local organisers said 1.2 million people packed the Plaza de Cibeles and surrounding streets, with more trying to get in.<\/p>\n
The crowd several rows deep cheered as the pontiff in his popemobile looped around the city centre plaza, with everyone eager to witness the first papal visit in 15 years.<\/p>\n
The open-air Mass was held on the Catholic Corpus Domini feast day, which often features processions of faithful through towns and cities led by a priest carrying the Eucharist. In Spain, as in other predominantly Catholic countries, the processions often feature elaborate floral carpets arranged along the route.<\/p>\n
According to Spanish organisers, the 16 flower carpets decorating the half-kilometre (half-mile) procession route off Plaza de Cibeles were prepared by a Spanish florists\u2019 association from Galicia. Florists used more than 30,000 flowers, most in the yellow and white colours of the Holy See flag, for the decorative floral carpets.<\/p>\n
At the end of the Mass, Leo carried a gilded monstrance, or container, holding a Eucharistic host and walked over the floral carpets, as children dropped additional petals before him and the crowd tossed petals from behind the barricades.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Published On 7 Jun 20267 Jun 2026 Pope Leo XIV has honoured Spain\u2019s centuries-old tradition of religious devotion…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":326897,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[155,157,156,10462,4686,116873,223,1968,9611],"class_list":["post-326896","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-corpus-christi","tag-corpus-christi","tag-corpus-christi-headlines","tag-corpus-christi-news","tag-europe","tag-gallery","tag-in-pictures","tag-news","tag-religion","tag-spain"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326896","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=326896"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326896\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/326897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=326896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=326896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=326896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}