Saying the pope was aware that the Bangladeshi government had provided shelter to “one million Rohingyas who were forcefully displaced,” Mr. Hamid noted the “atrocities of the Myanmar army.” “Women and children were brutally killed, thousands of women were violated,” he added. “They saw their homes burnt into ashes.”

Emphasizing a responsibility to ensure the safe return of the Rohingya to Myanmar, Mr. Hamid commended the pope’s past comments in defense of the Rohingya, in a way that amplified the pontiff’s more recent silence.

“Your passionate voice against such brutality raises hope for resolving the crisis,” Mr. Hamid said. “Your closeness to them, your call for helping them and to ensure their full rights, provide moral responsibility to the international community to act with promptness and sincerity.”

Francis arrived in Bangladesh, which Popes Paul VI and John Paul II previously visited, on Thursday to a ceremony of marching soldiers, tradition dancers and cannon salutes. The traffic-choked streets of the capital were cleared of cars and sometimes people for the pontiff, who paid respects at a memorial to those who fell in the country’s war for independence and at the home where Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, considered the father of the nation, was assassinated with much of his family in 1975.

But in this trip the pope’s words matter as much as any ceremony. And for all of his likely attention in the coming days on issues crucial to Bangladesh, such as climate change, labor conditions and terrorism, it is the word Rohingya, which the pope has so far declined to say, that may matter most of all.

Some dignitaries in the crowd felt that he had already raised awareness about the persecution.

“He did express in explicit terms the tragedy that has occurred in Burma,” Marcia Bernicat, the American ambassador to Bangladesh, said in an interview immediately after the speech. Describing the Rohingya as a people “who have been stripped entirely of everything, but they have their name,” she said the most important question for them now was “do they have a voice?” “And for everyone who bears witness to the suffering that they have been experiencing,” she added, “we help give them, and we help amplify, their voice.”