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The picture was taken by Emilio Morenatti, an AP photographer and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, during the popemobile tour through Barcelona last Tuesday. In the image at the top of this article, Pope Leo XIV gazes intently at a boy and holds both his hands as the two smile.
Morenatti later said the photograph was only possible because he broke with the routine photographers usually follow at this kind of event. ‘Covering a papal visit is often frustrating, because we are confined to fixed positions with little freedom to look for other angles,’ he explained. This time, however, he managed to slip past the security cordon and climbed onto a chair among the crowd.
With his lens at full zoom and the aperture as wide as it would go, he found a gap in the crowd just as the popemobile was passing in front of him. He fired off shots for a few seconds and, he said, immediately felt he had the picture he was looking for.
A family that had been praying for nine days
Behind the boy lies a story that began even before the Pope’s trip. Montse Martínez, 36, and her husband had baptised their newborn son Gaudí, in tribute to the architect of the Sagrada Família.
When they learned that Leo XIV would be visiting the basilica, they spent nine days in a row praying before an image of Gaudí himself in order to get tickets for one of the Pope’s events.
They succeeded, and ended up among the 40,000 worshippers who attended Tuesday’s prayer vigil. A security officer noticed the baby and lifted him up to the Pope to be blessed. He then came back for the couple’s other son, Joaquim, who is seven.
‘He was so overwhelmed that he could only smile; he was lost for words,’ Martínez told the Associated Press. It was at that very moment that Morenatti clicked his shutter.
From viral photo to reunion
Morenatti did not just distribute the image to the agency’s clients: he also posted it on X and asked for help in tracing the boy’s family, hoping to give them a printed copy. The post racked up more than half a million views and prompted hundreds of comments. Even the Church in Barcelona joined the search, appealing for help in Catalan, and one of the region’s best-read newspapers devoted an article to the story.
Joaquim’s parents, unaware of all this mobilisation, had seen the photograph in La Vanguardia and started looking for the photographer themselves. With the help of ChatGPT they found Morenatti’s name and wrote to him on Instagram. The photographer replied and the two sides ended up speaking on the phone, amazed at how quickly they had found each other.
The family hope to receive the printed copy of the photograph soon, to hang in their home in a village near Barcelona. Martínez trusts that the image will help pass on the faith to their five children and does not rule out the possibility that Joaquim’s encounter with the Pope might one day be included in Gaudí’s canonisation file. ‘For us it is a miracle of Antoni Gaudí, a gift from God,’ she summed up.