Pope to Spanish priests: 'Be holy and configure yourselves to Christ'

In order to be the priests the Church needs today, I leave you with the same counsel of your holy compatriot, Saint John of Ávila: ‘Be wholly His.’ Be holy!”

Pope Leo expressed these words in a letter sent to the priests of the Archdiocese of Madrid on the occasion of the Convivium presbyteral assembly, taking place 9–10 February in the Spanish capital.

In the letter, signed on 28 January 2026, the Memorial of the Doctor of the Church Saint Thomas Aquinas, the Pope acknowledged the challenges facing priests. He suggested that amid restlessness and secularism there is an even greater need to embody holiness and to help others fill the deepest desires of their hearts with the Lord’s presence and love.

The Pope began by noting that the moment the Church is living invites priests to pause together for calm and honest reflection, “not so much to remain focused on immediate diagnoses or the management of urgencies, but to learn to read deeply the moment we are called to live, recognizing, in the light of faith, both the challenges and the possibilities that the Lord opens before us.”

Along this path, he said, it becomes increasingly necessary to educate our gaze and to train ourselves in discernment, so that we may perceive more clearly what God is already doing—often in a silent and discreet way—in our midst and in our communities.

This reading of the present, the Pope underscored, cannot disregard the cultural and social framework in which faith is lived and expressed today. “In many settings,” he said, “we observe advanced processes of secularization, a growing polarization in public discourse, and a tendency to reduce the complexity of the human person by interpreting it through ideologies or partial and insufficient categories.”