Overview
- The Pope spoke to the Cortes Generales in Madrid, becoming the first pontiff to address Spain’s parliament and receiving sustained applause after urging protection of life from conception to natural death and defending the family.
- He warned against a renewed race for rearmament and called for diplomacy and multilateral solutions to migration, saying no nation can face contemporary migratory flows alone.
- The visit included a private meeting with Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez that government sources said highlighted shared priorities on migration cooperation and peacebuilding.
- Leone met Spanish bishops and held a private, hour‑long audience with six survivors of clerical abuse in which he pledged listening, truth, justice and reparations while several excluded victims’ groups criticised the lack of representativeness and the nonbinding nature of some reparations mechanisms.
- Mass turnout in Madrid — including reports of roughly 600,000 at a youth gathering and about 1.2 million at a Corpus Domini mass — has revived debate over the Church’s soft power in Europe and could affect Spain’s stalled legal moves on imprescriptibility of abuse and proposed abortion and euthanasia measures.