Santi Taboada
Pope Leo XIV delivered a lengthy and forceful speech at UNESCO headquarters. The pope defended human life from conception to its natural end, in every circumstance.
LEO XIV
Children in their mothers’ wombs and in the various theatres of war; people with physical and intellectual disabilities; the elderly; migrants and refugees; and all and all those arrogantly excluded as unproductive.
The pope said that forgetting these realities reduces human life from a gift to a product. He also said there will always be questions that technology cannot answer. On communication, he explained that while it is becoming faster, it is not necessarily becoming more truthful.
LEO XIV
Indeed, without truth, language becomes subject to the logic of violence and to the arbitrary will of the powerful. Others are then excluded in the name of profit, and the innocent are killed in the name of freedom.
The pope added that, at times, the law is invoked when convenient and ignored when it becomes a limitation, turning justice into a commodity.
Leo XIV invoked the story of the Tower of Babel to explain that the more oppression grows, the more people weaken themselves, something he said can be seen in exploitation and despotism.
LEO XIV
Today, the temptation of Babel reappears in a globalization pursued without fraternity, in rapacious forms of neocolonialism, in ideological impositions and in all those “contacts without bonds” that reduce human life to commerce.
For the second time, a pope visited UNESCO’s historic headquarters in Paris, where the Holy See is also a member. In 2027, the Vatican will mark 75 years of participation in the United Nations institution.
