On the same day Israeli and Iranian forces struck each other in the most serious breach of their two-month ceasefire, Pope Leo XIV stood before Spain’s national legislature and told European governments their expanding defense budgets were “troubling” — and that no weapon had ever resolved what weapons were used to fight.
His address to the Spanish parliament Monday was historic in the narrow sense: no sitting pontiff had previously spoken to that body. But the significance was less ceremonial than political. At a moment when U.S. President Donald Trump has pressed NATO allies to raise defense spending to 5% of gross domestic product — and European governments have been largely complying — the pope arrived in Madrid to make the opposite argument.
Leo said the world was in a “profound spiritual and cultural crisis,” expressed through violence, polarization, and a collapse of trust between nations. The diagnosis drew a seven-minute standing ovation from an assembly whose own country has navigated those pressures from an unusual position.
Spain has refused Trump’s 5% demand. Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has nonetheless overseen a tripling of the country’s defense expenditure since taking office in 2018, from roughly 10 billion euros to more than 34 billion. Leo named no one. The arithmetic spoke for itself.
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The speech, delivered in Spanish and running to one of the most comprehensive political statements of his papacy, covered ground that few of his predecessors entered so directly. He called last month for caution in the development of artificial intelligence; Monday he extended that concern to the battlefield, urging governments to apply what he described as “rigorous ethical vigilance” over the use of AI in warfare. The pace at which autonomous weapons technology has advanced across NATO defense programs has made that appeal something other than abstract.
Migration was the other weight-bearing axis of the address.
Leo will close his week-long Spain visit in the Canary Islands, where he is scheduled to meet migrants who made it across the Atlantic from West Africa. More than 3,000 people died attempting that crossing in 2025, often in small inflatable craft, according to the NGO Caminando Fronteras. The pope told parliament that how the world treats migrants is challenging the ethical foundation of the international order — language that framed the crisis not as a logistical problem but as a civilizational one.
He asked governments to move beyond what he called the mere management of migration flows and address the conditions that drive displacement in the first place: war, poverty, climate change. That framing is a political as much as a moral statement, and it diverges substantially from how most European governments currently approach border enforcement.
Sanchez’s administration has moved in a different direction from its continental peers. A mass amnesty program his government launched allows an estimated 500,000 immigrants to apply for legal status — a policy that Leo’s presence in Madrid lends a degree of implicit weight to, though the Vatican offered no direct comment on Spanish domestic law.
Before the parliament address, the pope spent an hour with six survivors of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy. He told Spain’s bishops they were obliged to listen to survivors and offer them reparations — a formulation sharper than much of the Vatican’s previous official language on the crisis. A 2023 report by Spain’s human rights ombudsman placed the number of victims in the country over several decades in the hundreds of thousands.
Not everyone who sought entry to that meeting was admitted. Some survivors said they were excluded and called the Church’s response insufficient. The Vatican confirmed the session took place and said those present had offered suggestions for how the institution should handle future cases.
Leo also weighed into the European debate over the Catholic seal of confession, which several countries — including France — have considered breaking to compel priests to report abuse disclosed in confidence. He rejected that argument, describing the confessional as a space where a believer could open themselves before God, and insisting it was not the state’s to enter.
Seven minutes of applause. An audience that included the country’s senior political leadership. A message that ran from AI weapons to migrant deaths in the Atlantic to what the Church owes those its clergy harmed.
The pope leaves for the Canary Islands having said, plainly, that the direction the world is moving is wrong.