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“Carry the Lantern”: Faith at the HLPF 2025 and the Conscience of the UN — in this Jubilee Year of HOPE

IPA - 25 Years at the UN

Why Nano Nagle matters at the UN today
In the shadow of widening wars, climate extremes, and deepening inequalities, the UN’s 2025 High-Level Political Forum (HLPF) asked how we can still deliver the 2030 Agenda with science, evidence—and solidarity—at the core. This annual stock take of the progress of the Sustainable Development Goals is loaded with HOPE.

In this Jubilee Year of HOPE, that question takes on new urgency. It’s hard to imagine a more relevant patron than Venerable Nano Nagle, who shouldered her lantern through Cork’s alleyways to educate children kept poor and to stand with those made invisible by law and circumstance. Her work was a gospel-forged practice of presence and liberation: contemplation that moved her feet; education chosen as an instrument of justice; and a fierce, practical compassion for people “in any kind of need.”

The same spiritual DNA animates the Presentation Sisters’ charism today: to “be compassion,” to seek union with God that spills over into work for those kept poor, and to do so with a global consciousness that reaches beyond the local to the systemic. In this year of HOPE, we are called to throw open the doors to possibility—and keep our foot on the door so it cannot swing shut on the most vulnerable.

The International Presentation Association: witness with a lantern at the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC).
The International Presentation Association (IPA) carries Nano’s lantern into UN corridors through its ECOSOC consultative status (granted in 2000). That status gives civil society actors a structured way to contribute expertise, testify to realities on the ground, and help hold the international system to its founding promise. In plain terms: it legitimises moral imagination in policy spaces—letting faith-rooted experience function as a kind of conscience for multilateral deliberation. In 2025, it also allows us to ask: where is the hope in the outcome, and how will we protect it?
Hope
Across the UN system, agencies have increasingly recognised that faith-based organisations (FBOs) are often the first in and last out with communities, and that their values, networks, and staying power can de-polarise, mobilise, and sustain change. That’s not romanticism; it’s operational fact documented by UN task-forces and entities engaging religious actors. HOPE, in this sense, is not optimism—it is endurance made visible in action.

HLPF 2025: the state of the promise
The HLPF met in New York from 14–23 July 2025, reviewed SDGs 3, 5, 8, 14, and 17, heard 37 Voluntary National Reviews (VNRs), and adopted a Ministerial Declaration after tense negotiations. The through-line was sobering: roughly 17% of SDG targets are on track; most are stalled or regressing; financing and political fractures are widening. Still, the forum reaffirmed universal health coverage (UHC), gender equality, decent work, ocean protection, and partnerships as accelerators—if backed by real money, data, and people-centered implementation. This Jubilee Year demands that these commitments become more than words: they must become seeds of hope sown in policies, budgets, and communities.

Reading the outcomes through Nano’s charism — and the lens of HOPE
Nano chose education as liberation because it shifted power towards people kept poor. Her lantern wasn’t charity; it was structural love. This year, her lantern also lights the door we’ve thrown open at HLPF 2025—ensuring it stays open wide enough for hope to walk through and remain.

1. “Be compassion” as a policy method. Compassion, in Presentation spirituality, means being fully present to the realities of people and Earth made poor—and then acting. At the HLPF scale, that means centering communities in design, financing, and measurement, not as beneficiaries but as co-authors. In this Jubilee Year of HOPE, it also means that every policy should carry the fragrance of possibility: a tangible sign that better is not only needed but achievable.

2. Contemplatives in action, guardians of hope. Nano’s contemplation put her in motion. For ECOSOC and HLPF practice, that means participation must move resources and rules. If VNRs and partnership pledges don’t translate into budget lines, labor protections, climate adaptation, and UHC entitlements, they betray both the Gospel and Agenda 2030. In this year of HOPE, our role is to guard the open door—keeping it ajar against the drift towards abandonment.

3. Education as a long-cycle accelerator. Nano’s classroom was a 30-year bet on dignity. Similarly, SDG delivery requires decade-long patience in systems change: universal foundational learning; health literacy; coastal stewardship; and worker patronage. This year, we name that patience as hope in action—an insistence that the future can be different because we have already started building it. We must think in decades but act NOW!

From declaration to delivery: a Jubilee pathway of HOPE to 2030
HLPF 2025 reset the stakes. With five years left, the forum reaffirmed the 2030 Agenda and adopted a Ministerial Declaration—but also exposed the fractures that stall real progress. If we take Nano Nagle seriously, then faith-based participation is not ornamental; it is determinative. It brings disciplined love—and credibility—to spaces that risk abstraction. It keeps the “preferential option” legible in policy, the lantern lit in a dark alley of budget lines and indicators, and—this year especially—it keeps the door of hope propped if not jammed open!

The task now is to convert this year’s outcomes into a common rule of life for our ministries and partnerships:
- Measure who’s missing (and fix the data).
- Finance the first mile (UHC, GBV response, decent work, coastal resilience).
- Protect civic space so communities can co-decide and co-monitor.
- Use ECOSOC access to insist on delivery, not just declarations.
- Keep our foot on the door—refusing to let it close on those left furthest behind.

Nano once wrote of taking in children “by degrees,” quietly, until two hundred were learning and the city had to take notice. That is the pace and persistence now required of us: contemplatives in action, system-minded and neighbor-close, carrying the lantern together so no one—no worker, no woman, no child, no coastal village—is left behind. In this Jubilee Year of HOPE, we hold the door open until all can enter.

Brian O' Toole