Remarks of Tommaso Urbani

   Posthumous Servitor Pacis Award conferred on Carlo Urbani, MD

 7 October 2003

United Nations Headquarters

It is an honor for me to be here this evening on this important occasion to receive this special award and to remember the person of my father, Dr. Carlo Urbani. For this I am grateful and I also express the warm greetings of my family to all those here present. 

What about my father?

Remembering his person, the most appropriate title we can give him is none other than “doctor without borders” for the spirit which has always animated his profession and his choices of life have brought him to pull down the borders to find people and become a citizen of the world with them. It was his firm conviction that every person has in the first place the right to have adequate health care and dignity without which there cannot be justice and peace. He wrote to a colleague in Cambodia: “We doctors are lucky for the opportunity we have to watch and touch people… and being in that special position which is ‘near the victims!’” 

It is without shame that I am here talking about him because everything which he lived was for many people heroic, exceptional, but for me and my family was normal everyday life. With his work, to help the most needy, he demonstrated to all of us how solidarity and love towards those who suffer, who through no fault of their own other than being born in Cambodia, Laos, Mauritania, rather than in Europe, are of value and worth living as well as dying for, because knowing him, I’m sure that if he could come back, he would do everything he did again, until the end. 

The fire of his passion (as he himself loved to define it) was animated not only by the knowledge of human needs but also by the great faith in the values of the Gospel: peace, sharing, solidarity, respect, etcetera. His person can be an expression of the example that Pacem in Terris gives to men of peace, as was said by my pastor: “To participate with competence and capacity. It is not enough to be illumined by Faith and to have the desire to do good to insert good principles in society and to enliven it with the spirit of the Gospel. To this end, it is necessary to insert efficacious works in institutions. However, our society differs in that it is known for its scientific-technical contents. For this reason it is not present in institutions and does not work efficaciously if one is not scientifically competent, have technical capabilities, and are professional experts.”  

And with his own words that can better summarize his person, he wrote to his brothers in Italy in 2000:

“I grew up following the mirage of making my dreams come true. And now I believe I have succeeded in this. I made of my dreams my life and my work. Years of sacrifice allow me today to live next to problems, those problems that have always interested me and disturbed me. Today these problems are also mine as their solution represents the everyday challenge that I need to accept. But the dream to provide access to health to the most disadvantaged segments of the population has today become my work. And in those problems I shall raise my children, hoping to see them become aware of the larger horizons that surround them and perhaps to see them grow up following dreams apparently unreachable, as I have done.” 

Thank you