By Carol Glatz
Pope Francis announced that he will canonise Blesseds Carlo Acutis and Pier Giorgio Frassati next year and that the Vatican will host a world meeting on the rights of the child on 3 February 2025.
The Holy Father will canonise Blessed Acutis on 27 April, during the Jubilee for Adolescents in Rome to be held from 25 to 27 April and Blessed Frassati during the Jubilee of Young People in Rome to be held from 28 July to 3 August.
Pope Francis made the announcement during his general audience in St Peter’s Square, Wednesday 20 November, which is World Children’s Day.
The annual celebration marks the date when the UN General Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of the Child in 1959 and when the assembly adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989.
“On the occasion of the International Day of the Rights of the Child and Adolescents that is celebrated today,” Pope Francis said, noting he wanted to announce holding a world meeting at the Vatican.
The World Leaders’ Summit on Children’s Rights will be dedicated to the theme of Let’s love them and protect them, and it will include experts and celebrities from different countries, the pope said.
“It will be an occasion to pinpoint new paths directed at better assisting and protecting children still without rights who live in precarious conditions. They are exploited and abused and suffer the dramatic consequences of wars,” he said.
A small group of children involved in preparing for the 3 February meeting joined Pope Francis for a photograph after the announcement along with Franciscan Father Enzo Fortunato, coordinator of the church’s first World Children’s Day, which was held in Rome on 25 May.
Pope Francis also established a new papal committee for World Children’s Day and named Fr Fortunato its president.
The new committee, he said, will ensure that “World Children’s Day does not remain an isolated event” and that “the pastoral care for children increasingly becomes a more qualified priority in evangelical and pedagogical terms,” he said in the decree, also known as a chirograph, published by the Vatican on 20 November.
The aim of the world day, he said, is to make a concrete contribution toward carrying out “the church’s commitment to children” by giving voice to children’s rights and making sure the church’s pastoral activities have the same kind of care and attention toward children Jesus had.
Other goals include helping the Christian community become more of “an educating community capable first of all of being evangelized by the voice of the little ones” and helping the church become more “like children” and let go of “signs of power” in order to become “a welcoming and livable home for all, starting with children,” the decree said.
Pope Francis said he wants the day to be celebrated at the universal, regional, national and local levels and, therefore, the committee will help promote and organise those celebrations with the universal event held “possibly every two years.”
“I entrust the preparation of World Children’s Day to the regional and national bishops’ conferences that will institute local organising committees,” he said.