DAVOS, Switzerland — The power brokers assembled here discuss the marvels and potential of what ever-new software and robots can bring in terms of efficiency and productivity, but the Vatican has issued a more sobering message.

In a letter to the World Economic Forum’s executive chairman, Klaus Schwab, Pope Francis beseeched the business moguls and government leaders to remember the poor.

“We must never allow the culture of prosperity to deaden us, to make us incapable of ‘feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor, weeping for other people’s pain, and sensing the need to help them, as though all this were someone else’s responsibility and not our own,’” Pope Francis wrote in the letter, quoting from a previous papal letter.

It is a theme that the pontiff has hit on throughout his papacy, including at previous World Economic Forums.