Pope Leo XIV’s visit to France last week drew enthusiastic crowds and renewed attention to signs of a religious revival in a country renowned for its deliberate secularism. An address on September 25 at UNESCO’s Paris headquarters took the conversation beyond more domestic concerns, focusing on broad international issues at a United Nations institution founded to build peace through education, science, and culture. Outstanding themes included the need for trust in multilateral institutions (and the patient work needed to build it) and judgments on progress linked to care for the most vulnerable.
The Pope once again invoked the image of the tower of Babel, representing unity imposed through domination (with plenty of hubris). Contemporary echoes include exploitation, neocolonialism, ideological conformity, and globalization pursued without fraternity. People may be connected economically but with weakened relationships. His contrasting image is the diverse public square of Pentecost, where people hear and understand one another in their own languages and differences contribute to shared understanding and action: “Communion in no way suppresses diversity.”
Speaking as a “witness to peace,” Pope Leo linked UNESCO’s educational, scientific, and cultural mission to the question of how these activities can help people flourish together. His focus on humanity invoked the shared helplessness and dependence of each and every infant. Nourishment, affection, care, and words are critical and common needs. When this vulnerability is ignored or forgotten, people whose needs are inconvenient or whose contributions cannot be measured by productivity tend to be dismissed. Dignity and dependence, he argued, endure through illness, disability, suffering, and old age. Care for those most readily excluded is the touchstone of our claims to respect dignity.
Education and culture give practical expression to shared responsibility. Recalling John Paul II’s 1980 UNESCO address, Leo emphasized education that helps people to “be” more rather than merely to “have” more. He invoked Paul VI’s vision of development embracing every person and the whole person. These references set questions of meaning, relationships, and responsibility alongside material wellbeing. Improving education, science, and culture must mean improving the lives of the people who sustain them.
And technology adds urgency to the challenge. Ironically, rapid communication can coexist with loneliness, and abundant information with falsehood. Artificial intelligence amplifies the problem when its impressive capabilities obscure questions about meaning and freedom. “Meaning is the oxygen of the mind,” Leo observed. Protecting children and young people, helping them exercise judgment in digital environments, therefore belongs at the heart of education.
Drawing on UNESCO’s founding conviction that the defenses of peace must be constructed in human minds, Leo warned about the different faces of opportunity and danger: science can transform but also serve destruction, culture can enrich lives yet become propaganda, and education can open vista but also manipulate consciences. He speaks of a culture of justice and a sustained willingness to recognize others as members of the same human family.
The speech appealed for trust in international institutions. Leo acknowledged their crisis of effectiveness. He also noted the tendency to dismiss dialogue as delay or empty performance. Yet the problems that today’s imperfect global governance institutions confront exceed any country’s capacity to solve alone. Cooperation needs confidence that differences need not constitute threats and that honest dialogue can produce a greater good.
And he argued that religious traditions have an essential contribution to this challenge, engaging questions of life’s purpose and connecting those questions to everyday choices. The hope and promise is that they can help communities turn a shared search for meaning into commitments to care and peace.
Leo’s address asks us to judge progress through those commitments. The quality of our institutions, technologies, and relationships is revealed in the lives of poor communities, displaced people, children, and others pushed aside. Rebuilding trust begins when their dignity becomes a practical responsibility shared across our differences.
