Pope at Congress: "Firmness does not require contempt; dissent does not entail humiliation".

Leo XIV's speech was the first address by a Pope to the Cortes Generales, and it was based on an uncompromising diagnosis: that the world is going through a profound spiritual and cultural crisis that manifests itself in violence, polarisation and mistrust. From this starting point, he called on legislators to speak out publicly in a way that respects those who think differently, institutions at the service of encounter and a social life that upholds "civic friendship and mutual respect in the midst of disagreement".

As on Saturday, he warned that rearmament as an "almost inevitable" response to international instability worries him, and recalled that "political plurality should not degenerate into permanent disqualification of the adversary". This is the thread that connects the three days of Leo XIV in Madrid : the conviction that words can "open roads or close them", and that those who exercise public responsibility have "a special obligation to guard the word". But his speech was also based on the idea that the recognition of the inviolable dignity of the person "precedes any concession by the State and cannot be subordinated to changeable social consensuses or to the sway of the majorities of the moment".

That premise allowed him to deploy a message of surgical equidistance - Nobody left the Palacio de las Cortes empty-handed. Nor did anyone leave unscathed. Pedro Sánchez's government, which is going through one of its worst political moments, beset by the cases of corruption that have hit the PSOE, has read the first days of the pontiff's visit as an endorsement of its positions on foreign policy and migration. Saturday's Pope - the one who charged against "identitarian approaches" and embraced a Senegalese migrant in Cáritas - was a comfortable ally. Monday's Pope in Congress was more demanding.

Leo XIV called for safe routes for migrants and condemned the mere "management of flows" as an insufficient response. But in the same speech he defended that all human life must be "recognised and safeguarded from conception to natural death" and rejected the "throwaway culture". "Can a community be called fully just if it leaves in the shadows the unborn child, the elderly, the sick, those who suffer in silence, or those who depend entirely on the care of others?

The Pope also vindicated the "primary and inalienable right" of parents to choose the education of their children and claimed the family as the "primary human reality". A message in which the right wing feels comfortable. However, he warned that wherever a person is discriminated against because of their national, ethnic, religious or linguistic origin, "the universal principle of the equal dignity of all human beings is seriously violated". A condemnation that in the Spain of the regional pacts between PP and Vox, where the so-called "principle of national priority" is making its way into housing and employment policies, acquires a political reading that is difficult to ignore.

With a message of respect for the division between the political and religious orders, Pope Prevost also defended the weight of the "Christian tradition" in the construction of "modern freedom". "In this inner school, people learned that law must serve the good, that justice sets limits to force, that power needs legitimacy, that the poor belong fully to the community, that the foreigner must be welcomed according to his dignity and that human life can never be treated as a commodity," he said. He went on to warn: "A law does not attain its true greatness merely because it has been formally approved; it does so when, in addition to being valid in its form, it can stand before the dignity of the person and emerge from that examination without embarrassment.

Paradoxically, his speech was widely applauded by politicians of all stripes. Only the BNG and Podemos were absent from the seats from which the head of the Catholic Church received an ovation of up to seven minutes. Among the absentees were also the two former socialist presidents, Felipe González and José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who was confined to his home to prepare his statement as a defendant in three corruption charges before Judge Calama. The Popular Party's José María Aznar and Mariano Rajoy did attend.