Over 1.2 million people in a single square. Pope Leo XIV set foot on Spanish soil for the first time, and Madrid answered with a turnout few events draw today - the Corpus Christi liturgy on Cibeles Square became one of the most massive religious gatherings in the city's recent history.

The Spanish royal family was there in almost full force. King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia, Princess Leonor and Infanta Sofía, Infanta Elena with her daughter Victoria Federica, and Infanta Cristina with her four children - Juan, Pablo, Miguel and Irene. When a royal family appears this united at a public event, it's almost never an accident; the presence itself is a message.

The scene was staged down to the detail: over 100,000 white and yellow flowers on the square, 1,600 priests serving together. After the mass, the Pope carried a monstrance 500 meters along Alcalá Street, covered with 30,000 carnations laid out in carpets by craftsmen who pass that skill down from generation to generation.

But the strongest sentence wasn't in the splendor, it was in the homily. The Pope said that the faith that drove Spain for centuries must not become "a museum of the past," but "a school of faith you drink from today." Spoken before a million and a half people, it sounds almost like a warning - that tradition without life is just decoration.

For the Balkan reader, used to how power and church know how to pose together, the scene is familiar even when it's someone else's. The question that remains is the same everywhere: how many of the million came for the faith, and how many for the spectacle - and is there even any need to separate the two?