(ZENIT News / Vatican City, 05.24.2023).- The International Meeting on Human Fraternity, entitled “Not alone” (#notalone), will be held in St. Peter’s Square on June 10th at 4pm and will simultaneously be held in eight other squares around the world, in the presence of Pope Francis.
In the square there will be 30 Nobel Prize Winners and thousands of youths from across the world.
The event is organized by the Vatican Foundation Fratelli tutti, in collaboration with St. Peter’s Basilica, the Dicastery for the Service of Integral Human Development and the Dicastery for Communication.
The initiative, inspired by the Encyclical Fratelli tutti, will involve people from all over the world to promote all together the culture of fraternity and peace and encourage personal commitment in choices and practices of reparation, dialogue, and forgiveness overcoming loneliness and marginalisation that deny human dignity.
The event will be attended by an international group of young people who, at the end of the event, will hold hands and join in a big embrace in the colonnade of St. Peter’s Square, the architectural symbol of the universal embrace of the Church. The event will also be attended by many representatives of ecclesial and lay commitment, families, associations, as well as all those who today are forced to live on the margins of society: from the poorest and homeless to migrants and victims of violence and human trafficking.
In addition, thanks to a memorandum of understanding signed with the Italian Ministry of Education and Merit, the Meeting will present the work carried out in recent months by Italian schools on the theme of fraternity.
The event is conceived as a process and experience promoting fraternity. It will be divided into two moments: in the morning some groups will meet to share experiences of communion; these experiences will be briefly reported in the afternoon. The Nobel Prize Winners – who have joined the initiative – will meet together and with leading figures from science, culture, law and international organisations to draw up a document calling for commitment to human fraternity. The document will be presented to Pope Francis in St. Peter’s Square and, together with the Holy Father, to all the people in the world who feel called to take up the appeal to build social friendship and the new paradigm of fraternity, justice and peace.
The afternoon event in St. Peter’s Square will begin at 4:00 p.m. and will be open to all, without registration. Admission to the square will begin at 2:00 p.m. Further information on the programme will be available online at: www.fondazionefratellitutti.org/notalone .
The meeting will be broadcast live on television by CTV and Vatican Media and, in streaming, on the website (www.fondazionefratellitutti.org) and on all channels Facebook and Youtube of the Foundation Fratelli tutti.
