No pope can afford to be completely apolitical, but Leo XIV, the first American pontiff, is proving to be more political than most — and he’s siding with the left.

It’s a grave mistake that can only hurt the Catholic Church on both sides of the Atlantic.

Leo has been in Spain the last few days, where immigration is today the dividing line between left and right.

Vox, the Spanish populist party, is surging in popularity, and recently the older conservative People’s Party has signed on to Vox’s idea of giving Spanish citizens priority for receiving government services and benefits — a policy known as prioridad nacional.

The country’s left-wing prime minister Pedro Sánchez, on the other hand, is pursuing the Spanish equivalent of Joe Biden’s immigration policy.

Spain has been flooded with immigrants both legal and illegal, and Sánchez is working to legalize hundreds of thousands who arrived unlawfully.

Addressing the Cortes Generales, the national legislature, on Monday, Pope Leo called for “safe and legal pathways, a respectful welcome and real opportunities for integration” for migrants and refugees.

Even when invoking “the right to remain in one’s own land,” the pope framed the issue as “working to ensure that no one has to leave their home due to lack of peace, security or decent living conditions, including economic inequalities and the effects of the climate crisis.”

Those last words are the stinger. A pope’s message will always include peace and compassion for the poor, but economic inequality and climate catastrophism are characteristically left-wing preoccupations.

World media have been taking the pope’s remarks as a rebuke to Vox — and populists everywhere — and a tacit endorsement for Sánchez and his left-wing governing coalition, which faces a general election by the summer of next year.

“Although polling indicates Spanish Catholics gravitate toward the right of the ideological spectrum, the pope’s focus on the suffering of migrants places him in greater political proximity to Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s left-leaning administration,” noted Jonas Loesel in Politico’s European edition.

The Associated Press made the same observation about the similarity between Leo’s and Sánchez’s views on foreign policy:

“The overlap is noteworthy since the Catholic Church in Spain has traditionally been closer to the conservative Popular Party than the left, which championed social issues such as same-sex marriage, abortion rights, and euthanasia.”

The New York Times summed up Leo’s relationship with Sánchez in a headline: “One Is the Pope, the Other an Atheist. They Both Oppose Trump.”

There is good reason to think the College of Cardinals — most of whose members were appointed by Pope Francis — chose an American to be the next pope as a counterweight to Trump and the rise of a politically significant right-wing traditionalist element in American Catholicism.

But populists like Trump and Vox are ascendant on the right precisely because of the failures of globalism, particularly the immigration emergencies brought about by liberal and progressive parties almost everywhere.

If Leo and others in the hierarchy don’t like Trump or Vox, they should direct their criticisms at the progressives responsible for the conditions that make immigration restriction popular.

In America and Europe alike, left-wing parties remain staunchly pro-abortion and opposed to the church’s most fundamental moral teachings.

Mass migration is making Europe more Islamic, and otherwise secular left-wing parties are encouraging this transformation.

Does the pope really want to side with atheism and Islam against populism?

What do conscientious Catholics do when the Holy Father signals they’re wrong if they vote for socially conservative parties that also favor reducing immigration?

Pope Leo seems to imagine the centrist politics of the pre-Trump era will someday return.

But Trump isn’t responsible for Europe’s changing politics, and even in America, Trump’s rise was largely the effect of failed liberal policies.

Leo is investing the church’s future in a mirage — while the reality is that the left will only become more anti-Christian and pro-Islamic over the years and decades to come.

The church needs a defender with the same spirit as the new populist defenders of America and Europe.

That doesn’t mean the church can ever be fully populist, just as it could never be fully in favor of free-market capitalism and always has reservations about the use of military force in modern international conflicts.

But to the extent the church must engage with the politics of this world, the pope must be as astute as Saint John Paul II was.

There were some in the church who believed Ronald Reagan was a hard-right warmonger and accommodation with communism was the only path to peace.

Indeed, there were some who thought communism and socialism, with their professed concern for the poor, were fundamentally more moral than Western-style capitalism.

John Paul II had no illusions.

Pope Leo, on the other hand, is badly misjudging this moment, in American politics and the world’s.

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