On Monday morning, February 3, 2025, Pope Francis opened an international summit on children's rights at the Vatican. He was flanked by Queen Rania of Jordan, who sat on his right, and various other political and religious leaders. In his speech, the Pope pleaded in particular for the millions of “invisible” children who have not been registered at birth. He also denounced the “murderous practice of abortion,” and the tragedy of migrant children, insisting that a child's life cannot be exchanged for anything.
Some 50 leaders gathered in the Clementine Hall, at the initiative of the Pontifical Committee for the World Children’s Day, set up by the Pope last November.
Among them were Indian Nobel Peace Prize winner Kailash Satyarthi, former Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri, Rabbi David Rosen, and FIFA President Gianni Infantino, who showed up with a soccer ball under his arm.
The suffering of children
In his opening address, Pope Francis, who also concluded the day's proceedings, spoke of the “millions of children” whose rights are being “trampled upon and ignored.”
In addition to the victims of poverty and war, he mentioned the 150 million “invisible” children who “have no legal existence” because they were not registered by their parents at birth. He cited the Rohingya children in Burma and the undocumented children at the border with the United States, who, with no legal protection, are easy prey to exploitation.
These comments come at a time when Donald Trump's migration policy program is receiving worldwide attention. The day before the 47th President of the United States was inaugurated, on January 19, the Pope warned against and deportation program that would penalize the “poor unfortunates who have nothing.”
Expressing his concern once again for migrant children who die on “journeys made out of desperate hope,” Pope Francis said it was “unacceptable” that “a child's life should end like this.”
On Monday, the pontiff also voiced concern about the situation in wealthier countries, where “anxious or depressed youngsters, and adolescents drawn to forms of aggression or self-harm” are on the rise.
And he points to the “pathological individualism of developed countries” where children “are mistreated or even put to death by the very people who should be protecting and nurturing them,” and suffer “social or mental distress and parental addictions.”
“Nothing is worth the life of a child”
“Increasingly, those who have their whole life ahead of them are unable to approach it with optimism and confidence,” Francis lamented, slipping in, “This is sad and troubling.” In fact, “nothing is worth the life of a child,” insisted the pontiff, for whom “to kill children is to deny the future.”
He spoke out particularly against the “throwaway culture of waste and profit, in which everything is bought and sold without respect or care for life.”
In this logic, “unborn life is sacrificed through the murderous practice of abortion,” he then lamented, saying that abortion “suppresses the life of children and cuts off the source of hope for the whole of society.”
He called for the world not to become accustomed to these tragedies, which must not become “a new normal.”
Throughout his text, the head of the Catholic Church warned against “certain practices in the media” that lead to the loss of “what is noblest in the human heart: mercy and compassion.”
Like the Pope, who denounced the exploitation of minors “forced to fight under the influence of drugs,” Queen Rania of Jordan pleaded in particular for the “right to childhood” denied to child soldiers. Her speech was followed by a panel of speakers discussing children's rights from a variety of social, religious, and political perspectives.
Holocaust survivor: every child is sacred
“Wherever a human life is touched, especially a child, a little of our hope and humanity is extinguished,” said Italian senator Liliana Segre, a Holocaust survivor, who was also at the Summit. A few days after the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust, the 94-year-old activist met Pope Francis in private before the opening of the proceedings.
Deported to Auschwitz at the age of 13 with her father, Liliana Segre testified for children's right to education, in the presence of the Pope and political, cultural, and religious leaders.
“I know personally what it means not to be able to go to school,” she explained. When she was 8 years old, in 1938, she was prevented from starting school by Fascist laws expelling Jews from Italian educational institutions.
Indifference can be worse than violence
“We were surrounded by indifference, which is sometimes worse than violence,” she said. An advocate of the memory of the Holocaust, she had the word “indifference” written at the entrance to the Milan Memorial, built under the tracks of the railway station from which the convoy that deported her to the concentration and extermination camp left in 1944.
For her, the Shoah is “universal in scope,” and includes “every type of unjust suffering [...] and unjustifiable violence.”
As she told the speakers around the table: “If we were to take sides only with certain children, forgetting the others, we would be betraying them."
As she went on, she urged us to “weep for children of all nationalities,” and spoke of “little Israeli children held hostage by Hamas, and Palestinian children among the rubble of Gaza.”
“All children are sacred and must not be touched under any circumstances,” she insisted. She warned: “Wherever a human life, especially a child's, is touched, a little of our hope and humanity is extinguished.”
Pope Francis announces the preparation of a document on children
Pope Francis thanked the summit participants for having constituted “an open ‘observatory’ on the reality of childhood all over the world, a childhood that is often wounded, exploited, denied.”
“In various thematic groups you have developed proposals for the protection of children’s rights, considering them not as numbers, but as faces,” he explained. “Children are watching us,” the Pope warned.
“For my part, in order to provide continuity for this commitment and to promote it throughout the Church, I intend to prepare an apostolic Exhortation dedicated to children,” he announced at the end of his address, leaving unexplained the scope of this document or its publication date.
