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Pope Leo XIV addressed the Spanish parliament on Monday afternoon, the first pope ever to speak from the floor of the Congress of Deputies in Madrid.

When he finished, the chamber rose. The ovation ran nearly seven minutes, and cries of “Long live the pope!” rang off the walls of a legislature in one of Europe’s most secular countries.

Seven hundred guests had gathered under tight security to hear the first American pope speak to Spain’s political class. He gave them a lesson in moral philosophy, albeit in a secular political setting.

The setting carried its own weight. This was the first papal visit to Spain in fifteen years, in a country that has drifted far from the Church and split hard along political lines.

Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, who leads a secular left coalition, sat in the chamber. His government has moved to compensate the victims of clergy abuse, even as it clashes with the bishops on other topics. A pope entering that room could have been received as an intruder, yet Sanchez’s deputies gave him seven minutes on their feet.

Leo built the speech around a single question he traced back five centuries to the University of Salamanca: what conception of the human person inspires a society’s laws, and what kind of society do those laws then build?