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MADRID (CNS) -- In a highly anticipated and historic speech to Spain's parliament, Pope Leo XIV urged modern-day leaders to be guided by ancient and Catholic principles that gave birth to universal human rights based on the inalienable dignity of the human person.

While Church and state legitimately remain separate, many virtues and aims of good governance and just laws are rooted in values profoundly marked and inspired by the Christian tradition, he told hundreds of lawmakers and leaders of judiciary branches June 6 in Spain's Congress of Deputies.

When lawmakers ask themselves "how to ensure that what is possible is just, that what is legal is truly humane, and that the will of the majority safeguards those goods that belong to all and respects that which no majority can legitimately violate," he said, the answer needs to "stand before the dignity of the person and pass that test without shame." 

Since landing in the capital June 6, Pope Leo has followed the usual protocols of meeting with the head of state -- King Felipe VI -- addressing representatives of civil society and diplomats, and spending time with local church-run charitable organizations, the Catholic faithful and the wider community.

Being invited to speak to a nation's lawmakers is a rare but not unprecedented event. The last three popes all became the first in history to address a nation's parliament or legislative body: St. John Paul II, being the first to speak before the Italian parliament and Poland's parliament; Pope Benedict XVI, to the parliaments of the United Kingdom and Germany; and Pope Francis, as the first pope to ever address a joint meeting of the U.S. Congress in 2015.

The U.S.-born Pope Leo, who spent nearly two decades serving in Peru, a land conquered by Spanish conquistadors and evangelized by its missionaries, became the first pontiff to address a joint session of Spain's legislative body.

International order is "crumbling," drifting away from norms aimed at coexistence, Francina Armengol, president of the Congress of Deputies, told the pope.

"We have no choice but to come together around what is essential and reformulate the measures that commit us to shaping a more just world" and work for human rights, she said before the pope's address. 

"We welcome you today with a willingness to listen and with the conviction that understanding among institutions, cultures and peoples is essential to addressing the great challenges of our time," said the leader during a time of severe political crisis in the country.

The government, led by Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, has been struggling with legislative deadlock, intense polarization and risks of collapse from corruption accusations and investigations.

It was against this political backdrop that Pope Leo took the floor, asking the leaders to look back at their own nation's rich history and to reflect more deeply into their own hearts.

"Spain has known how to view the human being as more than just a cog in the social, economic or political order," he said.

More than 500 years ago, Spain was a powerful monarchy and a growing global empire, conquering and colonizing the Americas, including extracting its natural resources and enslaving, coercing and killing its people.

These excesses and horrors triggered major moral and legal questions back in Spain, particularly among Catholic theologians who began debating whether Indigenous peoples had any rights and whether such military conquests were just. They radically challenged the long-held belief that Christianity, the papacy and a powerful empire could be the only source of or foundation for order and stability.

While classic and Christian thinkers, including St. Augustine, taught that the law must adhere to reason and is bound by a greater moral law rather than brute force, the 16th-century theologians in Salamanca, Spain, applied those ethical ideas to the new era's unfolding tragedies.

"When Spain found itself facing historic responsibilities of universal scope," Pope Leo said in his speech, the Catholic university in "Salamanca would undertake, with particular clarity, the moral and legal reflection that the situation demanded." 

Even though "society and the Church herself did not always live up to these insights found in their own Christian tradition," he said, these thinkers introduced the idea of "the irreducible value of every human being and the moral limits of power," which led to the core principles of international human rights. 

Spain's very own Christian thinkers "helped to shape a legal and moral consciousness capable of remembering that authority always entails responsibility and that every human being must be recognized as a subject of rights and duties," Pope Leo said.

Even today, the pope said, the whole world "continues to ask itself how to build peace on the recognition of the person and not on the imposition of force."

All those working in public service should be guided by the "Salamanca Question," he said, because power and coercion are still being wielded in old and new ways, including in "increasingly sensitive areas of personal and social life" with new technologies and biomedicine.

"Therefore, in the face of the transformations of our time, our discernment must focus on the place of the human person in our decision making and on how the dignity of work, solidarity, social policy and the common good are today being addressed in new ways," Pope Leo said.

"This discernment begins with a fundamental affirmation: every truly just society is built upon the recognition of the inviolable dignity of the human person. Such dignity precedes any concession by the state and cannot be subordinated to shifting social consensus or the whims of the majority at any given moment," he said, referring to Pope Benedict's address to the German parliament in 2011.

Recalling Pope Francis' criticism of a lingering "throwaway culture," which fails to recognize the inherent dignity of every human being, Pope Leo challenged the lawmakers to consider their serious "responsibility of legally ordering social coexistence."

"If life ceases to be recognized as a fundamental value, what future can our societies have? Can a community that casts into the shadows the unborn child, the elderly, the sick, those who suffer in silence, or those who depend entirely on the care of others be called fully just?"

As euthanasia and medically assisted suicide are legal in Spain and its government is now considering an amendment to constitutionally protect the right to abortion, Pope Leo said, "The defense of human life is neither a partisan issue nor a confessional interest: it is a goal of civilization."

When "the most vulnerable are the first victims," he said, "the law loses its deepest meaning: to serve and protect every person." 

"For this reason, the moral greatness of a nation is manifested, above all, in its capacity to accompany, protect and love those lives that are most fragile." 

"Without confusing the political order with the religious one," he said, it should be recognized that "modern freedom has also been shaped by a long education of conscience, deeply marked by the Christian tradition."

"In that inner school" of the human conscience, he said, "people learned that law must serve the good, that justice sets limits on force, that power requires legitimacy, that the poor belong fully to the community, that the foreigner must be welcomed in accordance with his dignity, and that human life can never be treated as a commodity."

A law attains "true greatness," he said, "when, in addition to being valid in form, it can stand before the dignity of the person and pass that test without shame."

A moral renewal is needed together with "technical solutions and legal reforms" to look "more deeply at what is at stake in every public decision," he said.

"I invite you, then, to lift your gaze to the world around you, not to turn away from reality, but to remember that every decision by public authorities affects real people, especially those who have less power to make their voices heard," Pope Leo said.

St. William of York, Bishop (Feast day is June 8th). William of York was the son of Count Herbert, treasurer to Henry I. His mother Emma, was the half-sister of King William. Young William became treasurer of the church of York at an early age and was elected archbishop of York in 1140. William's election was challenged on the grounds of simony and unchastity. He was cleared by Rome, but later, a new Pope, the Cistercian Eugene III, suspended William, and in 1147, he was deposed as ...

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