Vatican City, Aug 29, 2025 / 11:51 am (CNA).
Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli and American songwriter Pharrell Williams will direct a concert featuring musicians John Legend, Teddy Swims, Jelly Roll, Karol G, BamBam, and Angélique Kidjo in St. Peter’s Square next month.
The Sept. 13 concert, which is free and open to the public, will also include a drone light show and talks on themes including peace, justice, food, freedom, and humanity.
Called “Grace for the World,” the show will close the third edition of the World Meeting on Human Fraternity, organized by the Fratelli Tutti Foundation and St. Peter’s Basilica, and will be preceded by roundtables on social issues in Rome and Vatican City on Sept. 12–13.
Pope Francis established the Fratelli Tutti Foundation at the end of 2021. It is named after his 2020 encyclical on fraternity and social friendship, which expanded on themes in the “Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together,” signed with Sheikh Ahmed el-Tayeb, grand imam of Al-Azhar, in Abu Dhabi in 2019.
The final event of the World Meeting on Human Fraternity 2025 is intended “to communicate to the whole world, with a symbolic embrace, the joy of fraternal love,” Cardinal Mauro Gambetti, president of the Fratelli Tutti Foundation and archpriest of St. Peter’s Basilica, said at an Aug. 29 press conference at the Vatican.
Gambetti said organizers tried to “broaden our international scope” with the choice of music artists.
In the press conference, the cardinal said Karol G — a Grammy-winning Colombian reggaeton and urban pop artist — was asked to take part because she is Latin American and “because she is involved in important social work” with women and children. “It seemed relevant to the theme we are trying to address,” Gambetti said.
Prominent U.S. artists will also take the stage in front of the Vatican basilica: rapper Jelly Roll and singer-songwriters John Legend, Teddy Swims, and Pharrell Williams.
Thai rapper BamBam, who is also a member of the South Korean boy band Got7, will perform, as well as Angélique Kidjo, a Beninese-French singer, actress, and activist. The concert will also feature the choir of the Diocese of Rome and the Voices of Fire Gospel choir.
Andrea Bocelli, who has performed in St. Peter’s Square on previous occasions, shared in a video message Aug. 29 that his participation in the concert is “a great honor.”
“I sincerely hope that it will truly succeed in spreading, in everyone’s hearts, a sense of brotherhood and great humanity, which is so badly needed,” the world-famous singer added.
The World Meeting on Human Fraternity 2025 will start with a meeting with Pope Leo XIV on Sept. 12. The program will then focus on roundtables on topics including artificial intelligence, education, economics, literature, children, health, and the environment.
Sept. 13 will include an assembly on the topic of “What It Means to Be a Human Today” and a visit to St. Peter’s Basilica and the Holy Door of the Jubilee of Hope.
“While the world suffers from wars, loneliness, even new poverty, we have decided to stop and ask ourselves what it means to be human today,” Father Francesco Occhetta, SJ, Fratelli Tutti Foundation secretary-general, said Aug. 29.
“It is not an easy question, it even seems a little naive, but it is the only one that can save us if we ask it together,” he added.
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A Catholic event at a Catholic venue asks rather “what does it mean to be a Catholic Child of God in a hostile New World Order”.
But hey, Frutelli Tuti is not concerned with the pre-conciliar Catholic mission to Baptise the World.
Is this not the poisoned fruit of Vatican II’s submission to NWO?
To celebrate a commonality of humanity is to celebrate the pre-baptised state shared at one time by all humans. It is also to celebrate the post-Catholic Fratelli Tuti of Novus Ordo Seculorum, while the baptised are being silently genocided.
In the Muslim world, the “germ” of Islam is identified as “fitrah,” as in: ““There is not a child that he or she is born upon this fitrah, this original state of the knowledge of God. And his parents make him a Jew, a Christian, or a Zoroastrian . . . and if they are Muslims, Muslim” (the Hadith).
Missing in this fragmentary look at inborn and universal natural law, and at a complete human anthropology, is the more sobering identity of “original innocence” together with “original sin,” both, as unfolded for example in the opening parts of St. John Paul II’s “Theology of the Body” (1979-85).
Islam does not recognize original sin, in much the same way that Rousseau also celebrated the noble savage of pure nature in his mythology of the “Social Contract.” The Contract created in pre-history while the Qur’an is believed to be un-created from before history. What does it mean, then, to surely promote needed human “fraternity,” but then also fail to mention the realism of profoundly Christian fraternity?
Does the word even mean the same thing when co-signed by a Christian and by a Muslim emir from al-Azhar University in Cairo? But, now, with a renewed focus on Augustinian theology, what might the more complete message on real “fraternity” look like? Maybe an added touch of St. John Paul II’s “Veritatis Splendor” (1993) regarding the whole inborn natural law and the gratuitous life of grace—and moral absolutes in place of the Fundamental Option and proportionalism and consequentialism, and not reducible to either the ahistorical Muslim ummah/hegemony or to a Western NWO as a positivistic social construct?
We can but pray for a Catholic definition of the particular nature of that fraternity which is shared by the baptised with the deluded, the lost and the damned.
Wilfred Owen probably came close in saying in famous preface “The poetry is in the pity.” Indeed, Jesus emphasised pity in the Good Samaritain. A kind of Universal and often one-sided Poetic Pity unites us?
In their album to doomed modernity “Universal”, the group OMD committed a song with the same title and the line :
“We all bleed the same blood. When we die there’s no heaven above. It’s Universal.”
I fear that is what the seemingly freemasonic Universal brotherhood at Abdu Dharbi was all about.
Yet as Catholics know – many around the world during this Islamic Unholy War to their cost – we bleed rather martyrs blood. It is not the same blood. And there IS Certainly both a Heaven and a pretty full Hell with Judas now back in it (according to ppLeoxiv).
“True Universalism:
The Christian brotherly community does not stand against the whole, but for it. The brotherhood of Christians fulfills its responsability for the whole through missionary activity, through agape, and through suffering.”
Ratzinger’s The Meaning of Christian Brotherhood. Ignatius 1993.
There is no mention in Ratzinger’s work of abandonning the mission and working instead for the instauration of a freemasonic brotherhood of man. And yet that is the goal of Bergoglio’s Foundation Fratelli Tuti:
“It nourishes the initiatives aimed at encouraging the development of FRATERNAL HUMANISM, through the promotion of the principles of freedom, equality and fraternity, conditions for building a “universal love” that recognizes and protects the dignity of persons.”*
Can ppLeoXIV walk this back to Fraternal Catholicism? Does he recognise the need?
* source https://www.fondazionefratellitutti.org/en/our-mission/