World Day for Grandparents and the Elderly

Origin

The World Day for Grandparents and the Elderly was established in 2021 by Pope Francis to be celebrated each year on the fourth Sunday of July, close to the liturgical feast of Saints Joachim and Anne, the grandparents of Jesus. In 2026 the two dates coincide on Sunday 26 July, and the Holy Father Leo XIV has chosen as this year's theme the verse of the prophet Isaiah — “But I will never forget you” (Is 49:15) — an image of the tenderness that no forgetting, no distance and no algorithm should ever be permitted to break.

The AEGIS Reading

For AEGIS — The Human Algorithm Foundation — this is the founding day of the calendar. It is the moment in which the two urgencies that give the Foundation its name meet on a single horizon: the defence of the rights and voice of older persons, and the ethical governance of the machines that increasingly decide over their lives.

In a century that will soon count more grandparents than grandchildren, the way in which a society looks at its elders reveals the moral grammar it will pass on to its machines. An algorithm learns from the data it is given; but the data are always chosen by someone, and the choice is never innocent. When an aged person is invisible to society, she becomes invisible to the algorithm too: excluded from healthcare priorities, from credit scoring, from digital services, from the very language of public life.

The verse of Isaiah is, in this sense, the exact contrary of every algorithmic logic of forgetfulness. “I will never forget you” is not a sentimental promise: it is a covenant. It is what a civilisation owes to those who built it, and what a Foundation like AEGIS commits to translate into research, advocacy, care and law.

A word from Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia

“

By the initiative of Pope Francis, 26 July — the feast of Saints Joachim and Anne — has been established as the Day of Grandparents, to emphasise that very particular bond which unites grandparents and grandchildren. No longer simply the elderly, but this extraordinary relationship.

I would like to address an exhortation to grandparents: you have lived a long life, you have fulfilled a great many aspirations. What remains for you is a task that in some ways is unique — perhaps a masterpiece still to be completed: to help your grandchildren blossom into the life that awaits them, with hope and with passion.

— Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia
Chair of the AEGIS Foundation

What AEGIS proposes

• A modern, equitable and solidarity-based care model, centred on home care and on the dignity of the person, in dialogue with dioceses, universities and public institutions.
• An ethical framework for the algorithms of aging — from clinical triage to welfare, from insurance to mobility — grounded in the principles of the Rome Call for AI Ethics.
• A transatlantic intergenerational alliance between families, parishes, foundations and public administrations, so that the covenant of ages becomes an operational programme, not a slogan.

A prayer, a gesture

On Sunday 26 July, AEGIS invites its friends, patrons and collaborators to a simple gesture: call, visit, listen to an elderly person — a parent, a grandparent, a neighbour, a stranger in the parish. The most human of algorithms is a name pronounced with care.