VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Wrapping up a Vatican summit on the rights of children, Pope Francis announced he was going to publish a papal document dedicated to children.
He called the Feb. 3 summit venue in the frescoed halls of the Apostolic Palace, a kind of “open observatory” in which speakers explored “the reality of childhood throughout the world, a childhood that is unfortunately often hurt, exploited, denied.”
Some 50 experts and leaders from around the world, who shared their experience and compassion, he said, also “elaborated proposals for the protection of children’s rights, considering them not as numbers, but as faces.”
“Children are watching us,” he said, “to see how we are going about living” in this world.
The pope said he planned to prepare a papal document “to give continuity to this commitment and promote it throughout the church.” Those in attendance applauded the pope and his brief closing remarks and gave him a standing ovation.
The one-day world leaders’ summit titled, “Love them and protect them,” discussed several topics of concern including a child’s right to food, health care, education, a family, free time and the right to live free from violence and exploitation. It was organized by the recently created Pontifical Committee for the World Day of Children, headed by Franciscan Father Enzo Fortunato.
The invitees included Nobel Prize winners, government ministers and heads of state, leaders of international and nonprofit organizations, top Vatican officials and other experts.
Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 together with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said in his talk, “The threat of ecological devastation — which encompasses the climate crisis and also the biodiversity crisis — is a terrible burden that we are placing on our children.”
He praised the pope for highlighting “the spiritual crisis we face as stemming in part from the willful blindness that prevents so many from seeing the way in which our economic system is driving us toward the exploitation of both people and the planet at the expense of our moral values and the future of children.”
“Those that hold power today must alter our ways of thinking; and our new thinking must result in deep changes that transform our current systems of economics and politics, giving way toward a more just and ecologically-minded system that puts environmental and social justice at the center of our plans and efforts,” Gore said. “We have all the solutions we need.”
Kailash Satyarthi of India, co-winner of the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize and activist campaigning against child labor in India and advocating for the universal right to education, said in his talk that while he trusts everyone’s concern for children, he also feels ashamed.
“I am ashamed because we are failing our children every day. I am ashamed to listen to all these data and statistics that I have been listening” to and talking about for the past 45 years, he said.
“We know the problems, we know the solutions,” he said, but so far, everything has just been rhetoric and words.
The problem-solvers of the world “are not really honest (with) the problem-sufferers,” he said, when they lack any sense of “moral accountability and moral responsibility.”
“The solution lies in the genuine feeling and connection” to every child as if he or she were one’s own, he said. It is only when people feel genuine compassion will they feel “an honest urge to take urgent action.”
“We have to fight this menace (of child labor and poverty) and all other crises through compassion in action. We have to create a culture of problem-solving. Let us globalize compassion because they are all our children,” Satyarthi said.
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