New York, 29 April 2025
Mr. President,
My Delegation is grateful to you for having convened this extraordinary plenary session of the General Assembly to pay tribute to the memory of His Holiness Pope Francis.
Your Excellency, Mr. Secretary-General,
I wish to express deep gratitude to you for having travelled to the Vatican to represent the United Nations Organization at Pope Francis’s funeral last Saturday.
Your Excellencies,
Permanent Representatives,
Dear Colleagues,
Thank you for your presence today, notwithstanding the busy agenda, as we take pause to honour Pope Francis and reflect on his legacy.
Dear Friends,
A warm greeting to all here present, and those who are following remotely, wishing to honour Pope Francis.
I would also like to acknowledge the respect shown to the memory of Pope Francis by the lowering of the United Nations flag at all UN duty posts today. This honour has been echoed across the globe by the flags flying at half-mast in many of your capitals. Thank you.
Let me thank all the speakers who have delivered statements this afternoon. You have offered us a wonderful panorama of how Pope Francis’s Pontificate affected all regions of the world.
Dear Friends,
Pope Francis recognized the fundamental importance of multilateralism, with the UN at its centre as “the pledge of a secure and happy future”[1] for generations yet to come. While not afraid to highlight the need for “reform and adaptation,”[2] he was clear that the UN “remains necessary.”[3] His words and actions bore witness to this, and I would like to share images of three particular moments.
The first image takes us back to 25 September 2015, when Pope Francis, from this very podium, addressed a packed General Assembly. His presence was a clear sign of his appreciation for this Organization, especially at that moment when the programme of work for the next fifteen years was adopted.
Describing that plan as “an important sign of hope,”[4] Pope Francis encouraged world leaders “to ensure that all can have the minimum spiritual and material means needed to live in dignity.”[5] He further called on them to consider the foundation of integral human development, namely “the right to life and, more generally, what we could call the right to existence of human nature itself.”[6]
The second image comes from the eve of 2020, the 75th anniversary year of the UN Organization, when Pope Francis welcomed Mr. António Guterres, the Secretary-General, to the Vatican. In an unprecedented way, they delivered a statement together, warning the world that “we must not avert our eyes from forms of injustice and inequality, the scandal of world hunger, poverty, children who die because they lack water, food and necessary care.”[7]
They recalled the plight of all the displaced, and those who leave their countries in search of a better life, and yet, all-too-often, meet with a tragic fate. Unabashedly, they also declared that “the arms race and nuclear rearmament […] cry out to God.”[8] As an antidote, they underscored the importance of “trust in dialogue between individuals and between nations, in multilateralism […] for the building of a peaceful world.”[9]
The third image is that of the Statio Orbis – the prayer for the whole world – which Pope Francis led on 27 March 2020, during the Covid-19 Pandemic. In a dark and deserted St. Peter’s Square, the Pope’s purpose was to bring before the face of God the pain and anguish of all humanity, praying for divine assistance and bearing witness to the hope that together we might overcome that tragic moment.
At that instant the whole world understood that we are inexorably connected and interdependent. The coronavirus affected rich and poor, developing and developed nations. We all felt equally helpless and yet dependent on each other. We understood that global challenges require equally global responses.
But, from the very beginning of his Pontificate, Pope Francis also warned us that there is yet another uncontained pandemic, a moral one, which he defined as “the globalization of indifference.” It anaesthetizes us and, paradoxically, at the very moment when someone needs our help, we distance ourselves from them.
Pope Francis showed another way of behaving, one which he outlined in 2019, together with the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, when he signed the “Document on Human fraternity. For World Peace and Living Together.”[10] The insights he expressed in this document were crystallized in the Encyclical entitled “Fratelli Tutti. On Fraternity and Social Friendship,”[11]at the heart of which he placed the well-known parable of the Good Samaritan, who takes care of the one injured and abandoned on the roadside.
As Pope Francis keenly observed, there are no alternatives but to “trust […] in the best of the human spirit; […] to persevere in love, to restore dignity to the suffering and to build a society worthy of the name.”[12]
In this spirit, he chose as a motto for the Jubilee Year 2025 of the Catholic Church, which coincides with the eightieth anniversary of the United Nations Organization, the following: “Pilgrims of Hope.”
Dear Friends,
The best way we can commemorate Pope Francis today is to take that torch of hope and rediscover the spirit which, eighty years ago, created this Organization, so that together we can all work to hand on a better world to the generations that will come after us.
Thank you.
[1] Pope Francis, Meeting with the Members of the General Assembly of the United Nations Organization, New York, 25 September 2015.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Pope Francis, Meeting with the Members of the General Assembly of the United Nations Organization, New York, 25 September 2015.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Pope Francis & UN Secretary-General António Guterres, Video Message, Vatican, 20 December 2019.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Pope Francis & Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, Ahmad Al-Tayyeb, Document on Human Fraternity. For World Peace and Living Together, Abu Dhabi, 4 February 2019.
[11] Pope Francis, Encyclical Letter Fratelli Tutti, 3 October 2020.
[12] Pope Francis, Encyclical Letter Fratelli Tutti, 3 October 2020, 71.
