MADRID — Pope Leo XIV celebrated Mass before about 1.2 million people in Madrid's Cibeles Square on Sunday and used the first papal visit to Spain in 15 years to press the country's political leaders to stop, in his words, "fanning the flames of polarization."

The Chicago-born pontiff arrived Saturday with Spain in turmoil. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez's Socialist-led government is engulfed in corruption scandals, the conservative Popular Party and Vox have demanded his resignation, and the Spanish Catholic hierarchy is still reckoning with decades of clergy abuse. Leo's response, delivered to crowds the Vatican and local organizers said braved the heat at Real Madrid's traditional title-celebration square, was a call to lower the temperature on every front.

The welcome

King Felipe VI, Queen Letizia and Sánchez greeted Leo at the airport on Saturday. An estimated 500,000 people, many of them young, packed Plaza de Lima that evening for a prayer vigil. On Sunday, throngs lined the barriers around Cibeles Square waving flags and shouting "Long live the pope" as Leo passed in the popemobile, Al Jazeera reported. Handed the key to the city by Madrid's mayor, Leo wrote in the guestbook: "May Madrid continue to be a welcoming and inclusive city, where social life is inspired by true human values."

The message

In his welcome address, Leo singled out political leaders. "Today, the temptation to gain popularity by fanning the flames of polarization seems to have grown rather than diminished, and human dignity continues to be violated," he said. He invoked Spain's 800-year Moorish past, when Toledo and Córdoba became, he said, "centers of dialogue between languages, religions and knowledge," and urged Spaniards to read their own history with more complexity. "For the love of truth, I invite everyone to set aside the divisive and polarizing narratives of your societal reality and history," Leo said.

The address landed in a country split over immigration, feminism and corruption. Sánchez has bucked the European drift toward restriction by moving to grant legal status to potentially hundreds of thousands of unauthorized immigrants, citing an aging workforce and low birthrate. Vox and the Popular Party have made his migration policy a central line of attack.

The abuse shadow

Leo will meet survivors of clerical sexual abuse during the trip, he confirmed to reporters. "Abuses are still an open wound," he said. Felipe raised the same crisis in his welcome speech but argued the cases "neither are nor can be representative of the immense ecclesial community," pointing to a recently launched church-state reparations program for some victims.

The week's highlight comes Monday, when Leo will address a joint session of the Congress of Deputies and the Senate, the first papal speech to Spain's parliament. From Madrid he travels to Barcelona to celebrate Mass on Wednesday at the Sagrada Familia on the centenary of the death of its architect, Antoni Gaudí, then to the Canary Islands to meet migrants who crossed from West Africa.

The competition

Leo also acknowledged a more secular rival. Asked aboard the papal plane about Bad Bunny, who is performing 10 shows in Madrid on the same weekend, the pope answered: "If they are confronted with the question 'Do you want to go see Bad Bunny or do you want to go to see the pope?' I think many will see Bad Bunny." He added: "But I think there will also be a few here to see the pope. And that says something, you know."

The counterpoint

Leo's appeal for unity ran into a country whose right-of-center opposition argues the polarization runs in the other direction. The Popular Party and Vox have called on Sánchez to step down before a general election due by next year, citing corruption scandals around his government and what they describe as the failure of his migration policy. The church carries its own credibility deficit: shaped by the anticlerical violence of the 1936-1939 civil war and more recently by what PBS described as decades of clergy abuse and cover-up, the institution that delivered Sunday's sermon on dignity is still negotiating reparations with its own victims.

Leo addresses the joint parliamentary session on Monday before heading east to Barcelona.