The Vatican to Host Fifth World Meeting of Popular Movements for Social Justice

Vatican, October 20, 2025: The Vatican will host the Fifth World Meeting of Popular Movements. On 23 October, Pope Leo XIV will meet participants, continuing the dialogue initiated by Pope Francis more than a decade ago. For many, this encounter symbolises the continuity of a pastoral vision that places the Church firmly within the struggles of the poor and the working class.

As global divisions intensify under the weight of war, ecological collapse, and inequality, thousands of grassroots leaders from across the world are preparing to gather in Rome later this month. The event, to be held from 21 to 24 October represents one of the most significant encounters between the Catholic Church and the organised poor in recent years.

A Global Platform for the Excluded

Since its inception in 2014, the World Meeting of Popular Movements (WMPM) has become a global platform for the excluded: a network of workers, farmers, migrants, artisans, and community leaders who have embraced Pope Francis’s call for the poor to be “protagonists of their own history.” Under the pontificate of Pope Leo XIV, the meeting now enters a new phase, seeking to turn solidarity into political and social action at a time when human dignity and the planet itself are at risk.

The movement’s three founding principles—land, housing, and work—remain central to its vision. This year’s gathering expands the conversation, linking these issues to broader struggles for democracy, ecological justice, and peace. “We exist, we resist, and we organise,” states the declaration of intent, reflecting a decade of collective experience among movements that have transformed indignation into community-based action.

Participants will come from every continent: recyclers and informal workers of Latin America, small farmers of Africa, migrant labourers of Asia, and urban cooperatives of Europe. Their diversity reflects what organisers describe as “a culture of encounter”—a social and spiritual alternative to the isolation of global individualism. Bishops, theologians, and members of diocesan justice and peace commissions will also take part, walking alongside the movements rather than above them.

Themes and Global Challenges

The meeting’s agenda revolves around three urgent themes:

– Land: agrarian reform, food sovereignty, and ecological justice.

– Housing: access to dignified homes and defence of popular neighbourhoods.

– Work: labour rights, cooperative economies, and self-management of excluded workers.

Alongside these, participants will discuss the global democratic crisis, the rise of authoritarianism, forced migration, and climate disruption—issues that increasingly affect the daily lives of the poor. The gathering will culminate on 25 and 26 October with a Jubilee Pilgrimage of Popular Movements to the Vatican, seen as both a spiritual act and a political gesture reaffirming the shared journey towards social justice, peace, and the common good.

A Decade of Dialogue and Action

Over the years, each WMPM has marked a milestone in the Church’s relationship with grassroots movements. The first meeting in Rome in 2014 introduced Pope Francis’s “three Ts”—tierra, techo, trabajo (land, housing, and work)—as sacred rights rooted in Catholic social teaching. In Bolivia the following year, over 1,500 delegates adopted the “Santa Cruz Charter,” a manifesto calling for a new social order where “the economy serves people, not profit.”

In 2016, the Vatican hosted the third meeting, which widened the dialogue to democracy, displacement, and ecological stewardship. Pope Francis urged participants to resist both paralysis and corruption, calling politics “one of the highest forms of charity.”

When the pandemic struck in 2020, he wrote directly to the movements, proposing a universal basic income for workers excluded from formal economies. The 2021 online edition, held during lockdowns, reiterated the call to emerge from the crisis “better, not worse,” through solidarity and systemic change.

The 2025 meeting is expected to carry that same spirit forward while reflecting the leadership of a new pope. Organisers say it will focus not only on resistance but also on building viable alternatives—cooperative networks, community-based economies, and forms of popular democracy capable of healing the fractures of a world dominated by markets and exclusion.

Towards a New Chapter

Eleven years after its beginnings, what started as an experiment in dialogue between the Church and the marginalised has become a living network—a kind of popular synod operating from the peripheries of the world. In an era when globalisation too often deepens division, the World Meeting of Popular Movements insists that fraternity itself can be revolutionary.

Source: Zenit News