WeProtect Global Alliance commemorates the life and legacy of His Holiness Pope Francis

April 2025

It is with deep sadness that WeProtect Global Alliance joins the international community to commemorate the passing of His Holiness Pope Francis.

Throughout his life and papacy, Pope Francis was a powerful advocate for the human rights and dignity of all children worldwide. Pope Francis was a forward-thinking global leader who recognised, among many challenges facing humanity, the urgent need to ensure children’s safety in a rapidly evolving digital world, including seeing both the potential and risks of artificial intelligence on children’s safety.

WeProtect Global Alliance is immensely grateful to Pope Francis for his long-standing commitment to our mission and is honoured to have collaborated with him and the Vatican as we have built a cross-sector global movement to protect children from sexual exploitation and abuse online.

In 2017, Pope Francis delivered a powerful speech to the 2017 World Congress on Child Dignity in the Digital World, which was hosted by the Centre for Child Protection at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome in partnership with Il Telefono Azzurro and WeProtect Global Alliance. During this pioneering congress at the Vatican, Pope Francis highlighted the collective responsibility we share to effectively protect the dignity of minors in the digital world.

The following year, after our 2018 conference in Abu Dhabi, he became the first Pope to ever visit the Arabian Peninsula, accompanied by the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, where he publicly supported the efforts of the Interfaith Alliance for Safer Communities to foster dialogue and action across communities to protect the dignity of all children.

In 2019, at the Promoting Digital Child Dignity meeting at the Pontifical Academies of Science, Pope Francis spoke to religious leaders, representatives of governments, civil society and representatives of technology companies of the necessity of united global action, of interfaith and cross-sector collaboration and a global call to action to protect children online.

Ernie Allen, Chair of WeProtect Global Alliance’s Policy Board reflected:

“Today, we recognise the legacy of Pope Francis’s compassion and commitment to truly collaborative global action, which we will carry forward in our ongoing mission to protect children online.

To close the 2017 conference, Pope Francis said:

It was a clear challenge to all of us.  WeProtect Global Alliance is working tirelessly to meet that challenge.”