Leo XIV exploits discredited historical myth in Spain to push mass migration

(LifeSiteNews) — In a June 6 address before the Spanish royal family, the diplomatic corps, and representatives of civil society, Leo XIV promoted the discredited historical myth that Christians, Muslims, and Jews peacefully coexisted during the period of Islamic rule in Spain:

Security, which we all too often expect to find in weapons and walls, is in fact best achieved by learning to move forward alongside one another, growing together, side by side. Your own history bears witness to this.

The presence of Islam on the Iberian Peninsula, for example, constituted a long-standing political, cultural, and religious reality. During that period, there was not only confrontation, but also an attempt to create a space for contact, conversation and dialogue on the meaning of truth among Christians, Muslims and Jews.

Leo also seems to have alluded to this period earlier in his address when he said:

Your own history suggests that a culture of encounter, not confrontation, is what fosters stability and prosperity. In reality, the message of peace, which at present unfortunately strikes some as naïve and others as confrontational, is welcomed by those who do not shut themselves off in preconceived ideologies, but are rather open to the truth.

In this article, I will address the origins of this false understanding of the history of Spain and the way it has been used to further mass migration and the experiment of “multiculturalism.”

But first let’s look at the context of his remarks.

Leo XIV makes immigration a major theme of his visit to Spain

Leo XIV chose to make immigration a major theme of his speeches during his recent visit to Spain.

In a speech to the Spanish legislature on June 9, he called for immigrants to be given “a respectful welcome and real opportunities for integration” and said that “a coordinated, supportive, and effective response is indispensable, one capable of guaranteeing protection, welcome, and real opportunities for integration to those who migrate.” He called for borders to “cease to be places of abandonment and become spaces for the responsible protection of human dignity.”

On June 11, he addressed migrants directly:

Dear migrants: Before I say any more words to you, I want to bow before your dignity. You are not numbers, nor files! You are people with a family and a home you left behind, with dreams that no one has the right to despise.

He used the last day of his trip, June 12, to visit a center for the reception of migrants in Tenerife, making even clearer that support for migration into Europe was at the heart of his visit.

This support must have been welcome to Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, who recently announced an amnesty program that will give residency status in Spain to 500,000 illegal immigrants.

Many people in Spain have concerns about the impact of this program on public safety, but Leo XIV made only negative allusions to those who oppose mass migration.

What Leo XIV refuses to see

Leo XIV’s remarks have been made in the context of rising tensions across Europe. These are the result of what retired British MP Kate Hoey (Labour Party) recently called “the growing litany of atrocities committed by migrants or the descendants of migrants.”

It has too often been children who have borne the brunt of these atrocities. And often the authorities failed to protect children, even when it was in their power to do so. For example:

• Thousands – possibly tens of thousands – of vulnerable British girls were sexually abused by gangs of men of predominantly Pakistani origin, while authorities failed to intervene because, among other reasons, they didn’t want to harm “multiculturalism”.
• In July 2024, three girls between ages six and nine were murdered at a dance class by Axel Rudakubana and eight other children and two adults were injured. When his head teacher had raised concerns about Rudakubana she was accused of racial stereotyping.
• In August 2025, a frightened 12-year-old girl was arrested by police after she tried to defend herself and her sister against a Bulgarian man who had physically assaulted her. He had followed her and three other girls shouting “Come here sexy. I will show you how to have a good time.” The man falsely accused her of calling him a “(expletive) migrant.” His sister physically assaulted the girl’s sister. Public statements from Police Scotland falsely stated that the girls had approached the couple. The girls have since been vindicated.
• In December 2025, 18-year-old Henry Nowak was arrested and handcuffed as he lay dying after being falsely accused of racism by his Sikh murderer.

Leo XIV told migrants:

You are people with a family and a home you left behind, with dreams that no one has the right to despise.

The children murdered across Europe also had families, homes, and dreams, but their lives and their futures were brutally taken from them.

Does Leo XIV have any words for them or for their parents?

When the true history of this period is written it will not be one of western “racism” but one that tells of decades of remarkable sympathy, tolerance, and forbearance shown by the peoples of Europe in the face of terrorism and other forms of crime committed by those to whom they had extended the hand of welcome.

It seems that these decades of tolerance may be coming to an end. Increasingly Europeans, like many Americans, are calling for security for themselves and for their children through the proper protection of borders, an end to mass migration, and, increasingly, some form of “remigration.” This is not because of “racism” but because, to quote Hoey again, of “the growing litany of atrocities committed by migrants or the descendants of migrants.”

It is in the context of this migration crisis that Leo XIV decried “weapons and walls” and instead appealed to a mythical period of apparent coexistence when Christians supposedly lived at peace under Muslim rule.

Security through ‘weapons and walls’

Leo XIV’s interpretation of Spain’s past will not stand up to serious examination.

Spain was invaded in 711 by an Arab-led Muslim army and was almost completely subjugated “by weapons and walls” by 720. During the period of Islamic rule, Christians went from being the overwhelming majority of the population to being a small minority in Muslim-held territories.

However, by “weapons and walls,” a few Catholic strongholds in the north were able to hold out against the invaders and from these strongholds were able to reconquer the whole peninsula over the course of the next 781 years.

This period is called the Reconquista. The Church recognizes some of its leaders as among her saints. For example, St,.Ferdinand III of Castile (1198-1252) spent much of his reign at war and reconquered vast swaths of Spain, including Cordoba in 1236 and Seville in 1248. The Catholic Encyclopedia tells us that:

He watched over the conduct of his soldiers, confiding more in their virtue than in their valour, fasted strictly himself, wore a rough hairshirt, and often spent his nights in prayer, especially before battles. Amid the tumult of the camp he lived like a religious in the cloister. The glory of the Church and the happiness of his people were the two guiding motives of his life.

Many miracles were performed at his tomb. He was canonized by Pope Clement X in 1671.

The seven centuries of confrontation between Christians and Muslims were, despite temporary periods of peace, and occasional alliances, a conflict between two radically opposed cultures. Medieval Spain simply does not provide Leo XIV with an example of “learning to move forward alongside one another, growing together, side by side.”

In these paragraphs of his speech, he is rehearsing the frequently repeated, but nonetheless false, belief that under Islamic rule in Spain there was a unique culture of tolerance and exchange between Islam, Christianity, and Judaism.

What really happened in Spain?

Spain was a prosperous region of the Roman Empire. Like most of western Europe, it was invaded by a number of Germanic peoples in the fifth century. It was the Visigoths who finally established themselves as rulers of the whole Iberian Peninsula.

Initially Arian, but ruling a Catholic Hispano-Roman population, the Visigoths eventually became Catholic too. King Reccared (c. 559-601) was received into the Catholic Church in 589, followed by the aristocracy. For more than a century, Visigothic Spain would be as united and prosperous as any nation in western Europe in the early Middle Ages.

Medieval Muslim chronicles note the awe with which the Arab invaders entered cities such as Toledo, Seville, and Cordoba. Medieval Muslim historians recorded in detail the artistic achievements of the people they were conquering and contrasted them with the Arab invaders, who, by contrast, as Muslim historian Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) put it, “were barely coming out of their nomadic existence” and who “despised culture.” ^[1]

The Muslim conquest of Spain came toward the end of the series of extensive military conquests won by Arab armies over the course of the seventh century after the foundation of Islam. Motivated by zeal for their new religion, Muslim armies had conquered Persia and much of the Eastern Roman Empire, including North Africa and most of what we now consider the Middle East.

All these lands were conquered in the pursuit of jihad, holy war, which was understood, in the words of a modern professor of Islamic studies, to mean “to make war in order to outspread the Islamic religion and implement its law throughout the entire world, and its reward is paradise.” ^[2]

Ibn Khaldun explained that “the holy war is a religious duty because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and the obligation to convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force.” ^[3]

Muslim and Christian chronicles alike agree on the violent and destructive nature of the invasion, recording massacres, enslavement, especially of young women as sexual slaves, looting, the burning of towns, the desecration of churches and relics and the destruction of homes, vineyards and orchards. ^[4]

In the territories ruled by the Muslims, Christians and Jews were presented with only three choices: death, conversion to Islam, or the acceptance of second-class social status as dhimmis accompanied by payment of the jizya, a tax “imposed on the people of the Book to humble them” as Malik Ibn Anas wrote. The jizya was “protection money” paid by dhimmi, which means “beneficiaries of the contract of protection.” Refusal to pay would result in execution or enslavement. Payment of the jizya could be accompanied by ritual humiliation:

The dhimmi, standing, would present the money to the Muslim collector who would be sitting up higher on a sort of throne; this Muslim bureaucrat would hold the dhimmi by the throat telling him ‘Oh dhimmi, enemy of Allah, pay the jizya that you owe us for the protection and tolerance we grant you’; the other Muslims present would imitate the collector, pushing around the dhimmi and whoever other dhimmis accompanied him. To this amusing spectacle should be admitted any Muslim who wanted to enjoy it. ^[5]

María Rosa Menocal, who, as we will see, was one of the leading proponents of the myth of peaceful co-existence sanitized this subjugation as follows:

The new Islamic polity not only allowed Jews and Christians to survive, but, following Quranic mandate, by and large protected them. ^[6]

Darío Fernández-Morera, perhaps the most strident opponent of what he calls in his book of the same name “The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise,” comments on attitudes like Menocal’s:

[A] basic fact is lost in discussions and arguments about the details of the life of the Christian dhimmis of Spain, the so-called Mozarabs, and about how much or how little they benefited from Islamic “toleration” — namely, that they were by definition a subaltern group, a fourth- or fifth-class marginalized people in a hierarchical society, and that they were the victims of an extortion system, the dhimma, that gave them the choice that gangsters give to their victims: pay to be protected, or else.

[…]

Christians, again by definition, were not part of the Islamic umma but were merely tolerated and “protected” (a word with ominous meaning for anyone familiar with “protection” rackets) as long as they humbly kept their place and paid for said “protection”. ^[7]

In Islamic Spain, there was one law for Muslims, another for Christians. Muslims could testify against Christians, Christians could not testify in legal matters concerning only Muslims. Whoever calumniated a Muslim would be flogged; whoever calumniated a non-Muslim would not be flogged. A Christian would be executed for the death of a Muslim, but a Muslim would not be executed for the death of a Christian unless “treacherous.” Christians were encouraged to convert to Islam but converts to Christianity would be executed.

Christians could not exercise political power, carry weapons, ride horses in Muslim areas, bring up their children in the faith if married to a Muslim, or breach any one of many other prohibitions of this nature. ^[8]  Christians were also subject to a range of other restrictions such as being forbidden to build new churches, to repair those which had fallen into ruin, or to ring church bells.

At some times and in some places, these laws did go unenforced, but at other times Christians were subject to intense and violent persecution.

Given these historical facts, how did the idea of peaceful and tolerant coexistence ever become established?

The myth of convivencia

The myth of convivencia presents Islamic Spain as tolerant, open-minded, and advanced in contrast to Catholic Europe, which is presented as intolerant, closed-minded, and backward.

The idea that medieval Spain was a haven of multicultural tolerance has been widely adopted by liberal politicians, journalists, and broadcasters since the 1990s because it supposedly shows a historic example of multiculturalism being a success and because it portrays Islam as a “religion of peace.”

This understanding of Islamic Spain can be readily found in guidebooks, TV documentaries, second-rate journalism, and the speeches of Leo XIV, but it is not to be found in the work of serious academic historians.

The concept of convivencia originated with the Spanish philologist Américo Castro, who left Spain and established himself in the United States after the defeat of the Republican liberal-anarchist-socialist-communist coalition in the Spanish Civil War. American historian David Nirenberg writes, in an article entitled Convivencia vs. Race: On the Dangers of Extracting Morality from History, that Castro:

[P]resented the history of Spain as a “long parenthesis” of “oriental tolerance” for the coexistence of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, an attitude he thought Islamic and not Christian (“La tolerancia española fue islámica y no cristiana”), encoded already in the Quran, though its historical instantiation he looked for and found only in Iberia from the eighth to the fifteenth century. It is this parenthesis he taught us to call convivencia. ^[9]

He notes that “academic Arabists in Spain today consider Castro’s long parenthesis of oriental tolerance to be unsustainable from a historical point of view.” ^[10]

Nirenberg asks whether “medieval Iberia under Islamic hegemony” was “a place marked by a more peaceful coexistence of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity than that seen in other places and histories?”^[11]

And he answers:

The broad consensus of Arabists working in Spain in the generation or two since the end of General Franco’s regime … would suggest not. In fact, contemporary Spanish scholars of Iberian Islam rarely deploy the concept of convivencia.

[…]

Thus, for example, Eduardo Manzano points out that the Umayyad caliphs of Cordoba, the Islamic dynasty (929-1031) glorified for its tolerance by the North American scholar María Rosa Menocal, presented themselves not as protectors of diversity but as zealous guardians of orthodoxy. It was under their rule that much of the Christian population of al-Andalus converted to Islam, that the followers of the philosopher Ibn Massara were viciously repressed, that the library assembled by one caliph (al-Hakam) was burned by another (al Mansür/Hishām II). ^[12]

Nirenberg points out that examples of “tolerance” that can be used to support the myth of convivencia can be countered by contrary acts of “intolerance.” For example:

In the Taifa kingdoms [smaller independent kingdoms] that succeeded the Umayyad caliphate, for example, one Jew did reach the rank of vizier or prime minister in a particular time and place (the famous Samuel b. Naghrela in Granada circa 1038), while a generation later his son Joseph and much of the Jewish community of the kingdom were massacred by their Muslim neighbors. ^[13]

Similarly:

The most eminent Muslim scholar of that age, Ibn Ḥazm, could engage in extended comparative study of Christianity and Judaism while at the same time suggesting that Islam should no longer tolerate the ongoing presence of adherents of either religion — or indeed any dhimmī at all — within its borders. A version of that vision would in fact be implemented by the Almohad caliphate (c. 1121–1269), which decreed that Christians and Jews living in its Iberian and North African domains must convert to Islam or face death. ^[14]

This example is of particular interest in light of Leo XIV’s claim that there was an “attempt to create a space for contact, conversation and dialogue on the meaning of truth among Christians, Muslims and Jews.”

While it is true that there was sometimes contact between individual scholars across the religious divide, the suggestion that there was a deliberate, willed, “attempt to create a space for contact, conversation and dialogue on the meaning of truth” reveals only the limits of Leo XIV’s historical imagination. He is reading modern liberal concepts back into the past.

More recent revival of the myth of convivencia

In 2005 Jonathan Ray, professor of Jewish Studies in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at Georgetown University, noted that “in recent years” the term convivencia:

[H]as been embraced and distorted by an ever-widening group of academics, journalists, and politicians, a phenomenon that increasingly challenges historians of medieval Spain. ^[15]

At the forefront of the popularization of convivencia was María Rosa Menocal’s book The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain, which was published in 2002.

Menocal wrote that medieval Islamic Spain “had three principal and interlocking features which are at the heart of that culture’s extraordinarily vigorous well-being: ethnic pluralism, religious tolerance and a variety of forms of what we could call cultural secularism”. ^[16]

Historian Anna Akasoy noted that while Menocal’s book was very popular, “the reactions of specialists” were very different. Akasoy notes that “critical academic reception” was “sometimes unusually harsh.” ^[17]

Akasoy explains that “scholars of the medieval Iberian peninsula dismissed The Ornament of the World mainly because it perpetuates” the idea that Islamic Spain was a “historical utopia.”

Akasoy continues:

In addition to being an ideal model of interfaith harmony, this medieval society is envisioned by Western liberals to have distinguished itself through its intellectual progressiveness, artistic splendor, refined material culture, and greater freedom for women compared to other regions of the medieval world, both Islamic and Western. All these claims are deeply controversial.

She notes that:

[Menocal’s] portrayal of the tolerant society of medieval Muslim Spain may be said to rest upon a tendentious selection of historical material and perspectives.

She continues:

By delving, for example, into the Umayyad ʿAbd al-Rahman’s (731–88) homesickness rather than his treatment of enemies, the ruler is described in psychological and emotional categories and presented as a victim.

Karen Sullivan, a specialist in medieval literature, reviewed Menocal’s book and wrote:

Focusing too strong a light on certain aspects of Andalusian culture, Menocal leaves in the shadow evidence that would imply a different interpretation of it. She is drawing a myth, a beautiful myth, which, as myths do, proposes a model. ^[18]

The myth of convivencia is a clear example of how the liberal establishment can endorse a particular view of the past not because the historical evidence leads toward it, but because it is useful for achieving certain political ends.

They are committed to the migration of millions of people into Europe and to creating a “multicultural Europe” in place of the Europe of historic Christian nations. It is helpful for them to be able to point to a society where Christians and Muslims were able to live peacefully together for centuries, and under Islamic rule no less. As no such society has ever existed, they have found it necessary to invent one.

Fernández-Morera suggests that:

[P]erhaps since the 18th-century Enlightenment the critical construction of a diverse, tolerant, and happy Islamic Spain has been part of an effort to sell a particular cultural agenda. ^[19]

He continues:

In the past few decades, this ideological mission has morphed into “presentism,” an academically sponsored effort to narrate the past in terms of the present and thereby reinterpret it to serve contemporary “multicultural,” “diversity,” and “peace” studies, which necessitate rejecting as retrograde, chauvinistic, or, worse, “conservative” any view of the past that may conflict with the progressive agenda. ^[20]

Leo XIV’s speeches in Spain reflect this same “presentist” approach. He distorts history, like he distorts theology, in the service of the liberal order.

Against Leo’s tireless distortions of the truth, we must stand as firm as the Catholics of Spain once stood against the Islamic aggressor.

St. Ferdinand III, pray for us!