The pope noted on Monday the enduring clashes in Iraq and Yemen, where, he said, “There is an ongoing conflict that has been largely forgotten.”

Francis, who has spoken with great concern about the sharpening language between President Trump and North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, prayed “that confrontation may be overcome on the Korean Peninsula, and that mutual trust may increase in the interest of the world as a whole.”

He urged the world to contemplate the children of African nations including South Sudan, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Nigeria, and he recalled the children he met in his recent visit to Myanmar and Bangladesh.

That trip was overshadowed in large part by the question of whether he would address the persecution of Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslim minority. (He ultimately did, but only after leaving Myanmar.) Speaking on Christmas Day, he said he hoped the international community would “not cease to work to ensure that the dignity of the minority groups present in the region is adequately protected.”

Picking up on remarks he made at Christmas Eve Mass that served as a papal mission statement, Francis again spoke out for migrants and the “many children forced to leave their countries to travel alone in inhuman conditions, and who become an easy target for human traffickers.”