From the world’s tallest church, to a film about refusing to look up, to migrants met face to face, Leo XIV’s Spanish motto asks far more of us than a glance at heaven.
The motto chosen for Pope Leo XIV’s June visit to Spain — Alzad la mirada, rendered in English as “Lift up your eyes” — comes from John 4:35, where Christ tells the disciples beside the Samaritan well to look up and see the fields ripe for harvest. The Spanish bishops proposed it, the host dioceses shaped it, and the Holy See approved it; like most phrases that travel well, it works on more than one level. Three of them are worth lingering on.
The first is the obvious one, and Barcelona made it unavoidable. On Wednesday the Pope blessed the Tower of Jesus Christ at the Sagrada Família, the central spire that, rising some 172 meters (565 feet), makes Gaudí’s basilica the tallest church in the world. To stand anywhere near it is to be compelled to do exactly what the motto asks: tilt the head back and keep it there. The timing supplied its own symmetry. The cornerstone was laid in 1882, under Leo XIII; his namesake came to crown the work a century and a half later, on the exact centenary of Gaudí’s death — the architect lately set on the path to the altars. A church built to draw the eyes upward, completed by a pope whose very name already pointed in that direction. The literal reading is genuine. It is also the least of the three.
The second runs against a recent cultural reflex. In 2021 a film imagined a comet hurtling toward earth while a distracted public was coached to deny it: don’t look up. The phrase named something uncomfortably true about us — the refusal to raise our heads from the screens cupped in our hands, the downward stare that mistakes the device for the world. Alzad la mirada is the inverse instruction. To lift the eyes is not only to seek heaven; it is to notice what already stands in front of you. This is why the Pope’s visit to the Canary Islands belongs to the same gesture rather than sitting apart from it. Leo closed his journey there, among migrants who had crossed the Atlantic, meeting them face to face at the reception centers of Tenerife rather than as figures in a ledger. The humane attentiveness he brings to such encounters is of a piece with the slogan: look up from the phone, and the first thing you meet is your neighbor’s face. One can't help but notice Leo's own gaze: the intensity with which he looks into the eyes of every person he meets -- from babies to kings, from eyes filled with tears to eyes filled with laughter, is striking and unforgettable.
The third reading is the one a Catholic reader should not miss, and it is hiding in plain sight. Leo XIV is an Augustinian, and Augustine gave the upright human posture a theological weight the ancients only gestured at. The pagan commonplace — Ovid’s line that the Creator bade man stand erect and lift his face to the stars — Augustine inherited and quietly corrected. In his commentaries on Genesis, De Genesi ad litteram among them, the erect human form is not a trophy but an admonition: The body is made to stand upright so that the mind should be reminded to seek what lies above it. The standing is a sign; the real lifting happens within. Posture, for Augustine, is catechesis. That an Augustinian pope should carry a motto about raised eyes into the tallest church ever raised by human hands, and from there to the shoreline where the poorest of Europe’s newcomers arrive, is almost too fitting to be coincidence.
Which leaves the motto doing three things at once. It points to a spire, and asks us to admire what hands can lift toward God. It points outward, and asks us to raise our faces from the small bright rectangle in our hands to see the person beside us. And it points inward, in the Augustinian register, to the heart that must be lifted before the eyes can mean anything at all. The bishops who proposed it may have had chiefly the first in view. The Pope who carried it through Spain appears to have meant all three.
