Vatican City: Pope Leo XIV delivered a powerful and deeply human message to participants of the Fifth World Meeting of Popular Movements on Thursday, calling upon them to become “the hands and heart” of a world fractured by inequality, indifference, and inhuman social systems. Drawing inspiration from his papal predecessor, Pope Leo XIII, who authored the historic social encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891, Pope Leo XIV said that just as the Church once confronted the injustices of the industrial age, it must now face the moral crises of the modern world with the same prophetic courage and compassion.
Addressing representatives from grassroots movements, labor organizations, and community networks gathered in Rome, the Pope lamented what he called “the systemic arbitrariness of a world that boasts artificial intelligence in its pocket while millions lack food, shelter, or hope.” He warned that today’s economic and technological order, driven by greed and devoid of dignity, has created an illusion of progress while entrenching deeper inequalities. “Put simply,” he declared, “bad management generates and increases inequalities with the pretext of progress. When human dignity is not at the center, justice collapses as well.”
Pope Leo XIV’s speech was both a critique and a call to conscience. He reminded his listeners that his namesake, Pope Leo XIII, had spoken in an age of industrial upheaval a time when a small minority held economic power while the working poor toiled in near-slavery. “My predecessor took the side of the poor,” said Pope Leo XIV, “denouncing the submission of the majority to the power of comparatively few.” Today, he observed, that same structure of oppression has taken new forms: digital exclusion, ecological destruction, and a culture of waste that devalues human life.
In the face of these dehumanizing realities, the Pope placed his hope in popular movements those born in the peripheries of society yet animated by faith, hope, and love. “What I consider most important,” he said, “is that your service be animated by love. The world needs communities filled with faith and compassion, capable of transforming suffering into solidarity.” He described these movements as the “living conscience of humanity,” able to reach where governments, unions, and economic systems have failed. “You are called to fill the void left by institutions of the past,” he said, “which were not perfect, but whose collapse has left people more vulnerable than ever before.”
In one of the address’s most stirring passages, Pope Leo XIV reaffirmed the Church’s commitment to being a “poor Church for the poor.” He insisted that the poor are not marginal to the Gospel but its very heart: “Jesus has hidden His face in that of the poor,” he said. “The poor are not on the periphery they are at the center of the Gospel.” The Pope warned that indifference to inequality is the moral sickness of our time, describing inequality as “the root of social ills.” He urged the Church to walk “courageously, prophetically, and joyfully” with the world’s marginalized, confronting structures that “sow death and disparity.”
Turning his attention to the global crises of the modern era, Pope Leo XIV outlined several areas where humanity’s conscience is being tested. He cited the climate crisis as “the clearest and most tragic example” of a system that punishes the poor for the actions of the powerful. “The poorest people and nations,” he said, “bear the brunt of extreme weather, droughts, and floods caused by unsustainable development.” He also condemned the digital economy’s darker side the way social media amplifies false ideals of luxury and success, deepening the wounds of envy and exclusion among the poor. “Digital gambling platforms,” he warned, “prey upon human vulnerability, turning despair into dependency.”
The Pope then criticized the pharmaceutical industry for what he termed a “cult of bodily perfection” that reduces human pain to something “totally inhuman.” He connected this mentality to the devastating opioid and fentanyl crises that have ravaged communities, particularly in the United States. “When suffering is stripped of meaning,” he said, “the body becomes an idol, and the soul is forgotten.”
Highlighting the moral costs of modern extraction industries, Pope Leo XIV cited the exploitation surrounding the mining of coltan and lithium two critical materials for modern technology. “Coltan has led to paramilitary violence and child labor in poor countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo,” he lamented, “while competition for lithium has become a grave menace to the sovereignty and stability of poor states.” These injustices, he said, expose the hypocrisy of a world that calls itself advanced while building its prosperity upon the suffering of the powerless.
On the issue of migration, Pope Leo XIV balanced compassion with realism. He affirmed that states have the right to protect their borders, but he warned that security cannot become an excuse for cruelty. “Ever more inhuman measures are being adopted even celebrated politically that treat migrants as if they were garbage, not human beings,” he said. “Christianity proclaims a God who is love, who creates us and calls us to live as brothers and sisters.”
In closing, Pope Leo XIV praised popular movements and civil society groups as “champions of humanity, witnesses to justice, and poets of solidarity.” He noted that traditional workers’ associations and unions now represent only a fraction of laborers and have struggled to safeguard the vulnerable. It is therefore the task of popular movements, he said, to forge new paths of justice from below. “The Church supports your just struggles for land, housing, and work,” the Pope declared, echoing the words of his predecessor, Pope Francis. “These are sacred rights it is worthwhile to fight for them. And I say to you today: I am here. I am with you.”
With these words, Pope Leo XIV once again anchored the Church’s social mission in the lived reality of the poor, reminding the world that faith without compassion is empty and progress without humanity is perilous. His message was both a moral indictment and an invitation for nations, communities, and believers to replace indifference with solidarity, and to build a civilization where, as he said, “the least among us are no longer forgotten but cherished as the true measure of justice.”